This dissertation will discuss Steve Reich’s compositions from 1964 – 1993, with a focus on where and who his compositional techniques took influence from and how they have evolved. It will include looking at his use of harmonic, melodic, timbral and structural techniques. It will first examine the influences and context of developments in music leading up to this period, followed by detailed analysis of some of his major compositions.
“An experimental action is one the outcome of which is not foreseen” (Cage, 1961). John Cage is an American composer who studied in New York in the 1930’s, where he began to push the boundaries of music. In 1938 he composed the first piece for his invention – the prepared piano, ‘Bacchenale’. The prepared piano completely altered the sonic qualities of a grand piano; by placing anything that the composer chooses (nails, bolts, etc) onto the piano strings. These would be carefully arranged on the piano and often shown in diagrams so they are laid out in the same way at the start of each performance. Cage was influenced by an early 1900’s composer named Henry Cowell, describing him as ‘the open sesame for new music in America’ (Grove Music Online). In the 1910’s, Cowell started performing his pieces and made a name for himself as experimental pianist, with European composers such as Bartók and Schoenberg recognising the importance of his work. Bartók went so far to ask his permission to use Cowell’s most famous technique – the tone cluster. Tone clusters are a chord made up of three or consecutive notes of the scale, usually that of the chromatic scale so the notes would be separated by semitones. These clusters produce a very dissonant and harsh sound. The definition requires all the tones to sound at the same time but they can start at different times, a good example being Cowell’s first major work to include the technique; Dynamic Motion (1916). “It goes without saying that dissonances and noises are welcome in this new music” (Cage, 1961, p.11). Cage took influence from serialism and also Cowell’s techniques to explore his own route into experimental music. Cage famously composed 4’33 in 1952. This became to be one of the most controversial compositions of the 20th century, as it consisted of three movements where not a single note is played. 4′33 became for Cage, the epitome of his idea that any sounds constitute, or may constitute, music” (Gutmann, 1999). The idea behind this piece is that the environmental sounds heard whilst the piece is ‘performed’ is what constitutes the composition, allowing the listener to focus on sounds that might go unnoticed. Cage often refers to this piece as his most important composition. Other American composers who attended the New York School were Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, and David Tudor.
After the second world war in the 50’s and early 60’s, America was very much still trying to assert its identity within the musical world, opposing new Ideas coming out of Europe, with composers trying there own ideas. John Cage with his ‘chance’ music was perhaps the seed that inspired many others round the country to continue pushing the boundaries of music. In 1962, Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender, two electronic music composers, set up The San Francisco Tape Music Centre.
During its five-year existence, the San Francisco Tape Music Centre provided an ideal environment for a significant interaction between the counterculture and the West-coast avant-garde.
This was the most important era for experimental music, not only in America but also all over the world. The refinement of magnetic tape technology from the 1940’s meant electronic music was on the increase and music studios dedicated to this were opening up everywhere. “Magnetic tape technology had progressed to the point that tape was not just used as a means of recording but also as a new experimental musical medium” (Taylor, 2001).
It used to be said, that every composer must confront Arnold Schoenberg’s method of composing with twelve tones’ and come to some sort of agreement with it. Today the composer cannot afford to ignore the experience of working with tape (Sender, 1964).
Ramon Sender wrote this in 1964, showing the change of importance in compositional techniques. While Schoenberg’s serialism was still widely taught, the invention of the magnetic tape recorder allowed composers to use their imagination in a new way. Pierre Scheaffer was already starting the musique concrete movement in Europe using phonograph discs in the 1940’s before tape had even been invented.
The composers working in the studios in America and Europe with the magnetic tapes were all utilizing the new technology in different ways, with compositions bouncing around and influencing each other in ways no one could have predicted. One composer in particular, who used the tape machines in a unique way to create compositions was Steve Reich, a pioneer in the style of musical composition that would later be known as Minimalism.
Steve Reich joined Cornell University, New York, in 1953 and majored in philosophy. He had already established his love for music while studying drums with Roland Kohloff from the age of 14, and so took some music courses studying under William Austin, with whom he became friendly. Austin quickly introduced Reich to works of Debussy, Stravinsky and more notably the work of a French composer Perotin, “whose use of strict structures such as cantus firmus, iso-rhythm and, especially, canon and augmentation” (Potter, 2000) became a large influence on him.
After graduating from Cornell in 1957, Reich had now realised that his main interest was composition and so instead of engaging in postgraduate philosophy studies at Harvard University, he instead went to study composition privately with Hall Overton from 1957-8, and then with Vincent Perichetti at the Julliard School from 1958-61. At this time, Reich describes his music of always having a ‘harmonic centre’ and compares his style to that of the Third, Fourth and Fifth Quartets [of Bartok and] the Webern of Opus 5 [the 5 pieces for String Quartet] (Potter, 2000). It was upon finishing his studies at the Julliard School that Reich felt a need to experience a different cultural environment, away from his father’s influence, so he headed west to California. This offered him a new musical scene, studying under Luciano Berio at Mills College. It was here he took his own approach on the serialism movement, trying to ‘simplify’ the technique, he composed twelve-note music “which entirely avoided inversions, retrogrades and transpositions”, and he would just repeat the row ‘over and over’. It seems that this is where one of Reich’s most important compositional techniques, repetition, has its roots. It is important that Reich considered serialism technique and equally important that he rejected it, trying his own adaptation.
Whilst studying in the 50’s, Reich also knew of Cage’s work, and even went to the Cage retrospective at Town Hall in 1958. He recalls: “I was certainly aware of what Cage was doing”. Reich’s reaction to seeing Cage’s chance procedure compositions through tossing coins etc, was that there was no place for this compositional technique in his own music. He saw Cage’s direction and realized that his own was very different.
John Cage discovered that he could take his intentions out of a piece of music and open up a field for many interesting things to happen, and in that sense I agree with him. But where he was willing to keep his musical sensibility out of his own music, I was not (Reich, 1972).
In an article Reich wrote for MusikTexte in December 1992, he states that it is often suggested that Cage’s early compositions laid the groundwork for the kind of music he was writing in the 60’s and 70’s, but while recognising the ‘technical affinity’ between the works, Reich admits that he did not study Cage’s early works so they had ‘no conscious influence on his music’. It may be that Cage’s influence on Reich came unknowingly via two other composers working in a similar style to him.
Although Reich is considered a pioneer in the style of minimalism, he was not the first to experiment with techniques in this vein of music. In the early 1960’s, Reich discovered the music of La Monte Young and Terry Riley, two composers who along with Reich “would instigate the style known as minimalism” (Hiller, 2002). Young graduated from UC Berkeley in the late 1950’s, where he was producing music that rivalled Cages “radical displacement of what constituted a piece of music” (Hiller 2002). Young’s first major work in this style was his Trio for Strings (1958) where he experimented with extremely long held tones that can ultimately alter ones perception of time via very slow harmonic changes. This is said to be one of the fundamental characteristics of minimal music, and Young’s most important contribution to the music that takes a step away from serialism, and towards miminalism. Riley and Reich met in 1964 when Riley was in the audience at the San Francisco Mime Troupe where Reich was performing. The two later got to know each other and began to discuss each other’s music, particularly Rileys work in progress; In C. Thisis a piece where players play many different repeating patterns simultaneously. Reich became involved with the piece by helping set up the ensemble to rehearse the piece, and also contributed the idea of a pulse to keep the musicians in time. Reich’s interest in repetition, he says, grew out of working with tape loops in the early sixties, but mainly through his involvement with the performance Terry Riley’s In C, in 1964.
The can be no doubt that the experience of meeting Riley and becoming involved in this particular time had a radical effect on the development of Reich’s own music, helping to crystallize his own work at an especially fortuitious moment. (Hiller, 2002)
Reich wanted to “find a new way of working with repetition as a musical technique” (Reich, 2002). He was also interested in tape music, but not in the way that composers in the musique concrete movement were using it. This music, pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer, a French composer, was based on taking natural and real sounds and using them in composition, as apposed to using electronic tones.
“Conrete music is a ‘montage’ or assembleage of live sounds which are subjected to two main types of treatment: (1) tape manipulation and (2) electronic modification. Through these two means, relatively familiar sounds can be made unrecognizable and then reassembled to give the most unexpected results.” (Brindle, 1987)
Brindle has divided Tape manipulation techniques into 6 main categories:
Changing speeds, reversing tape direction, tape cutting and editing, tape loops, superposition of sounds, and multi-track recording. The electronic modification of these sounds for means of composition could include filtering, reverberation and ring modulation. All of these effects can be used in ways to enhance, distort and adapt natural sounds into a composition.
Reich notes in an interview with Jason Gross in 2000 that he “felt that his heart belonged to the musique concrete (referring to anyone who makes tape music) people”, referring specifically to Stockhausens Gesang der Junglinge (1955-6), which is a piece made up entirely of the multiplied and altered recordings of a single boys sung and spoken word, as an influence to some of his early tape works. Reich goes on to explain his opposition to some of Schaeffer’s composition techniques. He maintains that while using the recorded sound of a car crash is fine, manipulating it in ways so that it looses all its meaning, in turn strips the sound of its ‘emotional resonance’.
“I remember it seemed disappointing that tape music, or musique concrete as it was called, usually presented sounds that could not easily be recognised, when what seemed interesting to me was that a tape recorder recorded real sounds like speech, as a motion picture camera records real images. If one could present that speech without altering its pitch or timbre, one would keep the original emotional power that speech has whilst intensifying its melody and meaning through repetition and rhythm.” (Reich, 2002).
It was this reaction to the musique concrete movement and also his experiments with repetition that lead Reich into his first major composition, and his most important discovery: the phasing technique. Reich actually discovered the phasing technique by accident as he states in his book, Writings on Music.
“In the process of trying to line up two identical tape loops in some particular relationship, I discovered that the most interesting music of all was made by simply lining the loops up in unison, and letting them slowly shift out of phase with each other.”
The first composition that came from this technique was It’s Gonna Rain, and often noted as Reich’s ‘first important composition to use minimalist techniques’ (Potter, 2000). It was quickly followed by a similar piece entitled Come Out. Reich already had an interest in working with recorded speech and had tried previous times, notably with the poetry of William Carlos Williams, but was unsuccessful with setting his words to music at this time. Its Gonna Rain and Come Out were composed, despite Reichs admitted failure to utilize the texts. It’s Gonna Rain is a piece of two parts; both made up of fragments of speech of a black preacher, preaching about the flood that Reich recorded late in 1964. Part 1 is the ‘literal embodiment’ of the phasing process where two loops come in and out of sync. Part 2 of the piece using a different fragment of the speech, that does not ever come back into synchronization, simply, going further and further out of phase until ‘it is reduced to noise’. Reich, impressed with the man’s voice and the melodic quality in his speech, began making tape loops of his voice recordings. Reich used two Wollensack machines and one Ampex machine to record It’s Gonna Rain, which were the cheapest he could find, “exacerbating the extent of the drift which revealed this effect to him” (Potter, 2000). The two tapes were lined up in unison and then by the means of the technology the two tapes would gradually go in and out of phase with each other. “The experience of the musical process is, above all else, impersonal” says Reich about the precision of the process, and the fact that once it is set up, it runs purely by itself. Upon listening back to the process for the first time, Reich had realised that it wasn’t the individual relationships that the process created that were the main source of interest – but the actual process happening itself, gradually unravelling and revealing all sorts new sounds within the loops. “These mysteries are the impersonal, unintended, psycho-acoustic by-products of the intended process” (Reich, 2002). Each person will react and hear different things when they listen to the piece and “it’s precisely the impersonality of that process that invites this very engaged psychological reaction” (Reich, 2002). However, Reich didn’t want the original phrase of the loop to loose its meaning all together. The meaning, as well as the musical quality, of the words on the loop “It’s gonna rain”, were not ‘forgotten’ or ‘obliterated’, but intensified and strengthened by the constant repetition. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 had generated a strong feeling of uncertainty within the public and that ‘nuclear disaster was a finger on the button away’. Suddenly, the preacher’s words about Noah and the flood had a new meaning and the words It’s Gonna Rain “thus offer a metaphor of impending nuclear holocaust” (Potter, 2000).
Following his work on It’s Gonna Rain and eager to refine the phasing technique he had created, Reich composed two more pieces in 1966, which were Come Out and Melodica. “Come Out was essentially a refinement of Its Gonna Rain”, where Reich felt he had better choice of speech. The voice he used was of a boy, then 19, Daniel Hamm, who is describing the beating he took in Harlem’s 28th precinct police station.
“Come Out is composed of a single loop recorded on both channels. First the loop is in unison with itself. As it begins to go out of phase, a slowly increasing reverberation is heard. This gradually passes into a canon or round for two voices, then four voices and finally eight” (Reich, 2002).
Melodica came shortly after this, and Reich purposely uses almost exactly the same rhythmic structure as that of the spoken voice in Come Out. Listening to these two pieces consecutively demonstrates how a rhythmic process can be realized in differing sounds. This was to be Steve Reich’s final purely tape piece composed of musical pitches, rather than spoken word, that he put together with tape loop manipulation. His next step was to take the phasing process into a live situation – with two players performing the process rather than letting a machine take its course on two loops. Reich was initially sceptical and unsure whether it would be possible for two players to perform this type of composition, as it had been created at the hands of a machine, but was so sure that it would be an interesting live performance, that he had to try it. To test this, he recorded a short piano loop and then tried playing along with it, as if he were the second machine. Reich does admit that this way of playing the piece lacked the “perfection of the machine”, but at the same time he found that it was a almost a new way of playing; allowing him to be completely absorbed in playing whilst listening but free from having to“ read notation”.
This piece was titled “Piano Phase”. Reich composed this piece in 1967, and planned to take it to live performance with the help of Arthur Murphy, finding that with two pianos they did not need mechanical aids to perform the process. Reich also found that whilst he could notate the piece with dotted lines between bars to indicate the phase shifting, a performer would find reading the music whilst playing distracting. Piano Phase is based on 3 short rhythmic patterns; “the first of twelve beats in B minor, the second eight beats forming an apparent E dominant, and the last is four beats in A” (Reich, 1967). These patterns can be memorized in a few practises and then the performer must fully indulge them, in the listening whilst playing the format mentioned previously. The first player starts the first pattern, and is joined by the second player playing in unison. The second player then gradually speeds up his pattern, while the first player stays at the same tempo, until they are exactly one beat ahead of the first player, where the tempo matches again. This process happens a full cycle of twelve phases until the players are back where they started playing the same pattern in unison. This demonstrates Reich’s philosophy, that music is a gradual process perfectly.
What you have to do to play the piece is listen carefully in order to hear if you’ve moved one beat ahead, or if you’ve moved two by mistake, or if you’ve tried to move ahead but have instead drifted back to where you started (Reich, 1967).
The same structure is then followed in the second and third sections, however these processes take gradually less time as of the number of beats respectively. Playing and performing this piece accurately is “total involvement with the sound: total sensuous-intellectual involvement” (Reich, 1967: p24). A listener on the other hand, is presented with a great number of different patterns that are revealed during the phasing process, that jump out and grab your attention for split seconds before disappearing back into the piece.
The pattern (see above) used in Piano Phase is a nesting of two repeating figures, one of three notes ascending (E-B-D), and one of two notes alternating (F#-C#). Epstein (1986) notes that not only do these notes complete the melodic pattern for the piece, but also the use of the nesting patterns to ‘function harmonically as the two contrasting sonorities of the piece’. The twelve cycles in the first section of the piece can be broken down into phases 1-5, phase 6 (which is only heard once), and phases 7-11 which are the retrograde of phases 1-5, with the roles of the players revered. This means that despite different starting points, phases 1 and 11, and 3 and 9, etc are exactly the same. Epstein provides us with an analysis into the harmonic relationship of the melodic pattern as it is phased against itself throughout the piece, which begins with the sonorities playing in unison. He notes that the even numbered phases consist ‘mostly of perfect consonances’ with pairs of minor thirds and minor sevenths. Phase 6 is the only phase that appears once, and interestingly is made up of ‘entirely perfect consonances’ with the sonority E-B-D in sync and the alternating sonority of F#-C# out of sync, so when player 1 is playing the F#, player two is playing the C# and vice-versa. “The interweaving of the unison E-B-D outline with the recurring F#-C# dyad will separate the two sonorities in the clearest way possible” (Epstein, 1986). It is the odd numbered phases that are made up of mainly dissonant pairings, including three pairs of seconds, two pairs of sixths and just one made up of perfect fourths.
This brings us back to Reich’s quote; “These mysteries are the impersonal, unintended, psycho-acoustic by-products of the intended process” (2002). Epstein in his article Pattern Structure and Process in Steve Reich’s Piano Phase (1986)describes the ear identifying with ‘landmark situations’ in the piece, such as the splitting of unison and tempo doubling when two patterns are exactly 180 degrees out of phase with each other.
The transitions between phases vary in both content and character depending on the nature of the preceding phase, the following phase, and the composite double-time melody formed at the midpoint of phasing. (Epstein, 1986)
Although these changes seem sudden, we are aware and can hear the process happening gradually within the music. Reich describes the listening to such a gradual process as ‘impersonal’. It is this impersonal listening to a ‘completely controlled’ gradual process that lets the details of the sound extend further than can heard. The process can be listened to multiple times, and the listener will hear new patterns and different sounds each time, whether they are creating sub melodies within the overlapping pattern, suddenly hearing the original pattern clearly , or in the phasing periods where the pianos briefly feel like they are being played with delay. Epstein closes his essay:
The reappearance of unison in Piano Phase is such an event because, as the pattern emerges and finally locks into phase, we are reminded that, however obscured, it has been there all along.
This is an important point to consider, as it shows how Reich has used one melodic pattern, unaltered of pitch and timbre, and applied one simple gradual process, to provide us with such a range of new patterns and rhythms heard throughout the entire piece. This completely sums up Reich’s approach to composition at this point in his life, and a further refinement of his phasing process for live instruments.
Reich’s realization of the phase process for live instruments in Piano Phase leads him to experiment further with this technique, and his next composition was named Violin Phase (1967). This again, as Reich has shown from one composition to the next, took the similar compositional ideas he had already been using to the next level. In Violin Phase, there are three or four violins repeating a melodic pattern and phasing against each other, rather than just the two voices in Piano Phase.
As one listens to the repetition of the several violins, one may hear first the lower tones forming one or several patterns, then the higher notes are noticed forming another, then the notes in the middle may attach themselves to the lower tones to form still another. (Reich, 1967)
The focus in the piece has become not so much about the actual points where the voices phase against each other, but the shear amount of melodies that arise when there are more than two voices involved. Reich introduces a new technique in this piece also, to ‘help out’ the listener. As it is up to the listener what their main focus within the piece is, they choose which patterns they are listening to at every point in the piece. Reich uses another violin, to double up some of the new patterns that arise out of the repetition and phase shifting. This is introduced very softly and gradually increases in volume until it is at the surface and the listener is focused on it, and then is gradually faded out. Reich’s intentions for this are to open up the listener’s ears and hope that the ‘pointing-out’ of one pattern can lead to the user hearing more and more on their own. “When I say there is more to my music than what I put there, I primarily mean these resulting patterns” (Reich, 1967).
In the summer of 1970, Steve Reich travelled to Ghana where he studied with the master drummer of the Ewe tribe. Reich had previously studied Jazz drumming from a young age but despite this, he still felt it necessary to go and study the African techniques first hand. He was initially inspired by A. M. Jones’ “Studies in African Music”, a book which was published in 1959 (Reich began reading this book in 1963) and had already had two short lessons with Alfred Ladzopko, an Ewe master drummer based in New York. This ‘taster’ for the African drumming confirmed Reich’s trip to Ghana, where he would learn the techniques behind the Ewe’s drumming, and utilize these for his own compositions. Before Reich’s trip to Ghana, Jones had been the only previous person to transcribe the drumming patterns of the Ewe tribe and to examine the treatment of rhythm in African music (Jones, 1959). In current times, due to the works of David Locke (1982), John Chernoff (1979), and James Keotting (1970), it is generally agreed that this question has been answered. However, in Reich’s time he was still very much in the dark, and the first hand experience he gained while in Ghana must have given him a vital understanding greater than most other people at the time. (Anku, 1997).
In his “Writings on Music” (1965-2000), Steve Reich talks about one relaxed and informal dance that is extremely popular called ‘Gahu’. Importantly Ghanaian dances are strictly performed only at the right time and place (Reich, 1971). The names of the different dances are the same name given to the music which accompanies it. Reich began his learning with Gideon Aloruorge, who taught him to play bell (gong-gongs), rattles (axatse) and drum patterns each day. Reich recorded each session and when he retired to his room he would play the tapes back so he could transcribe all the patterns he had been taught. Reich became interested in part of the Gahu known as the Hatsyiatsya patterns, which are songs sung to the accompaniment of two gong-gongs and two atokes. “This accompaniment is a miniature polyrhythmic drumming made of beautiful bell sounds” (Reich, 1971). The two atoke players make up the base pattern, which never changes throughout the piece, however, the second player may switch any or all of his single eighth-notes with two sixteenth notes. The first gong-gong pattern is equal to half the atoke pattern, made up of just two quarter notes. The gong-gongs have no set rule about when to change between patterns, as long as they change together. Players can also swap the order of the high and low bells within a particular pattern.
“Pattern two for the gong-gongs is a simple alternation of double sixteenth notes on their lower bells, which acts as a sort of changing pattern leading into their third pattern, which for the first gong-gong, begins on the last eighth note of the atoke pattern, while the second gong-gong begins on the third quarter note of the atokes” (Reich, 1971).
The full drumming for the Gahu consists of: one or two gong-gongs, one or more rattles and the drums (in order from smallest to largest): kagan, sogo, and agboba which is the master drum. The customary Ewe master drum is usually the atsimevu, but as the Gahu is imported from Nigeria, the agbobo is used. Similar to the Hatsyiatsyu song, the Gahu also has a basic pattern, but rather than played on the atoke it is now played on the gong-gong, and it is exactly the same pattern. Helpfully, Reich has transcribed these drum patterns in his book “Writings on Music” 1965-2000).
He notes that this basic gong-gong pattern in 4/4 seemed quite unusual for West African music, as bell patterns are usually in 12/8, so Reich wrote to Jones (1959) with his query, who confirmed that the patterns he had transcribed were correct. In the Gahu, just like the basic pattern in the Hatsyiatsyu once again, if a second gong-gong doubles the basic pattern, the player is free to swap two sixteenth notes for one eighth notes on any or all of the beats. Reich also points out that the atoke is not used in the full drumming of the Gahu, only the Hatsyiatsyu songs. The rattle is played with a down and up stroke, the down stroke following the pattern of the gong-gongs and the up stroke filling in the rests. The kagan drum plays a pattern close to that of the gong-gong and the rattle throughout the entire piece, and this is generally its role in all the Ewe music, not just the Gahu. Reich states in his writings that, although he only learned one, there are many different master drum patterns each with its own response from the kidi and sogo drums. The master drum is free to make “constant improvised variations” on his pattern where as the kidi and sogo remain unchanged until the master drummer moves to the next pattern.
Reich also learned another social Ewe dance called Agbadza. This worked in a similar way in that the gong-gong would play the basic unchanging pattern, with the rattle following this on the down strokes and filling in the rests on up strokes. Ewe drums can be played with both hands and sticks, X’s in Reich’s transcriptions show muted beats, which are played slightly differently for each drum. The added tension that muting has on the drum results in a high pitch and is therefore important to the piece. The gong-gong starts the pattern with one hit on the low bell before moving to the high one. This indicates where the first beat of the basic pattern is, and the gong-gong player can use the low bell to signal this first beat to other players if anyone gets lost. In this dance, the master drum is the sogo, supported by the kidi and the kagan. The sogo player signals the other players with ‘unbroken eighth notes’, telling them that a new pattern is about to begin, and the players move on together. Reich was taught that each drum pattern had ‘nonsense syllables’ and also a literal meaning, as a way of helping players remember them. For example, the gong-gong pattern in Agbadza means, “Let me go and witness this myself and return.” Reich notes that the lack of written language in Africa means that these dances and musical patterns may be a literal recorded history of the tribes.
These patterns may sound complicated and difficult to understand when written down in such a way, but it captures, “in simplified miniature, the essence of African rhythmic structure: several repeating patterns of the same or related lengths and each with its own separate down beat” (Reich, 1971). Analysing the African drum patterns in such a way, breaking down and separating all different patterns has been frowned upon:
“To analyze the patterns of a drum ensemble piece individually is to miss the main characteristic of the music, which is the totality of the sound produced by the interrelation of the various parts” (Koetting, 1970).
Reich however, was not studying with the Ewe tribe as a musicologist. Breaking down the different patterns was essential to his learning. Reich travelled to Ghana as a composer, and his interests lay within the rhythms and how the parts worked together, rather than the sound of the entire ensemble.
Shortly after his trip to Ghana, Reich composed Drumming, a piece made up of 4 sections. The first for mounted bongo drums played with sticks, the second for three marimbas and two women’s voices, the third for three glockenspiels, whistling and piccolo, and the fourth section combines all voices and instruments. Drumming marks Reich’s final use of the gradual phase shifting process as a compositional tool, and the introduction of four new techniques:
1. The process of gradually substituting beats for rests (or rests for beats).
Drumming is constructed entirely from one basic rhythmic pattern, which begins as single beat played in a cycle of 12 beats with rests on all the other beats. Over time, the rests are substituted for beats until the basic pattern is being played in full. The same process is applied for the reduction, but beats are substituted for rests in this case.
2. The gradual changing of timbre while rhythm and pitch remain constant.
Towards the end of each section, the new set of instruments will come in playing the same pattern as the previous, gradually fading in whilst the previous gradually fade out. This provides a gradual change in timbre whilst the rhythm and pitch remains constant. “The sections are not set off from each other by changes in key, the traditional means of gaining extended length in western music” (Reich, 1970). Drumming shows that the pitch can remain constants if supplied with enough rhythmic developments, as well as ‘occasional’ changes in timbre for variety.
3. The simultaneous combination of instruments of different timbre.
A notable aspect of Reich’s music up until this composition is that “it had been written for ensembles of two or more identical instruments” (Reich, 1970: 66). Examples of this are some mentioned so far, It’s Gonna Rain, Come Out, Piano Phase, as well as the first three sections of Drumming. This is because, as Reich describes;“The phasing process is only clearly audible when the two or more voices moving against each other are identical in timbre”. In the final section of Drumming, Reich combines all the instruments and voices from the first three sections and has them playing the same rhythmic pattern over the top of each other, with the individual instruments phasing against each other creating distinguished patterns within the music. Reich describes this combination of timbres as giving the composition a much richer sound.
4. The use of human voice to become part of the musical ensemble by imitating the exact sound of instruments.
In this piece, Reich uses the voices to very precisely imitate the sound of instruments rather than merely singing words. (Reich, 1970). The women’s voices imitate the marimbas in the second section by creating ‘bu’ and ‘du’ sounds. The use of whistling is ‘necessitated’ for imitation of the glockenspiels because of the high range, so much so that a piccolo is required for the highest range. The voices do not simply imitate the exact patterns that the marimbas are following, but mimic patterns created when the marimbas are playing the same pattern one-quarter note out of phase with each other. The singers “slowly rise to the surface of the music and then fade back into it, allowing the listener to hear these patterns, along with many others”, due to the exact mimicking of the instrument sounds. (Reich uses a similar technique effectively in Violin Phase, however this is with the same instrument rather than human voices).
Reich describes the influence his trip to Africa had on Drumming as “confirmation”. He specifically refers to his ‘natural inclination’ towards percussion and also that “acoustic instruments could be used to produce music that is genuinely richer in sound than that produced with electronic instruments”. In an article in the New York Times Reich also stated:
The least interesting form of influence, to my mind, is that of imitating the sound of some non-Western music, This can be done by using non-Western instruments in one’s own music (sitars in a rock band), or in using one’s own instruments to sound like non-Western ones (singing Indian style melodies over electronic drones)…Imitating the sound of non-Western music leads to exotic music; what used to be called “Chinoiserie”.
Alternately, one can create a music with one’s own sound that is constructed in light of one’s knowledge of non-Western music and let that study lead one where it will while continuing to use the instruments, scales and any other sound one has grown up with. This brings about the interesting situation of the non-Western influence being these in thinking, but not in sound. This is a more geniuine and interesting form of influence because while listening one is not necessarily aware of some of non-Western music being imitated. Instead of imitation, the influence of non-Western musical structures on the thinking of a Western composer is likely to produce something genuinely new.
Schwarz (1981), in his essay: Steve Reich: Music as a Gradual Process Part II, notes “a myriad of non-Western influences found in Reich’s music, all incorporated using traditional western materials, in the composers own personal style”. Reich’s trip to African merely confirmed his intuition of non-Western techniques that he was in fact using before his trip to Africa. Schwarz goes on to give examples of these techniques, including Reich’s use of polyrhythmic structures, where different patterns have different downbeats, his static non-modulatory structures, his choice of timbre, and his preference for live ensemble over electronics.
In 1973, Reich continued experimenting with his own compositional techniques and composed a piece, called Music for Mallet instruments, Voices and Organs. In Reich’s own words this piece was very much an extension of the last section of Drumming. This piece combines ‘two simultaneous and interrelated musical processes’ (Reich, 1973). As in Drumming, the patterns on the marimba and glockenspiels are built up beat by beat, with duplicates being one or more beats out of phase with the original, and when they reach maximum activity a woman’s voice doubles some of the resulting patterns from the marimbas. This also triggers the second musical process: the slow augmentation of the voice and organs chords where they double then quadruple and continue to elongate throughout each section. This is a simpler version of the augmentation of a single chord that Reich uses in Four Organs, and where in this piece he has combined it with techniques from Drumming, he has created something new. Reich notes that the use of voices to double the chord of the electric organ was something that took trial and error when composing the piece. He went through various instrument sets including woodwinds and brass accompanied by both women’s and men’s voices but continually encountered problems with tuning stability when the notes got very long. The use of the alto and soprano women’s voice with the organ worked best.
The two women adjusted their tuning far more precisely, the organist and singers moved more closely together rhythmically, and the electric organ was infused with the sound of the human voice (Reich, 1973).
In 1974, Reich began working on a piece, Music for 18 Musicians, which turned in a new direction; “although its steady pulse and rhythmic energy relate to many of my earlier works, its instrumentation, harmony and structure are new” (Reich, 1976). The piece begins with all 18 instruments pulsing a cycle of 11 chords, each playing different notes within the chords, which is then repeated at the end. This pulsing at the start involves “more harmonic movement” than any of other of Reich’s completed works to date. Reich uses the wind instruments and voices, who have to take breathes, as a guide for all the instruments to follow in the rise and fall of each pulse, and when to move to the next chord. This pulsing continues throughout the entire piece across all the sections, with the wind and voices playing notes for as long as they can sustain, until they need to take a breathe. This determines the length of the pulse, and is contrasted by the constant rhythm of the pianos and marimbas. After the pulsing introduction, each section focuses on one of the 11 chords heard at the start, and a short piece (or two, on the third chord) is created. “These pieces or sections are basically either in the form of an arch (ABCDCBA) or in the form of a musical process, like that of substituting beats for rests” (Reich, 1976). Techniques used in each section are re-used in later sections, but appear to utilise differing harmony and instrumentation. Reich gives an effective analogy of how to understand the piece in terms of resemblance between family members; “Certain characteristics are shared but others will be unique” (Reich, 1976). This piece marks the beginning of a new technique Reich continued to use in future composition: the use of a series of harmonies that would outline the structure of the piece. “Since Music for 18 Musicians, harmony has assumed increasing structural primacy in Reich’s work” (Schwarz 1990). Another technique that Reich used for the first time in this piece was using a two or four chord cadence to change the accent of an unchanging melody. The cadence would be heard on the first beat, then on a different beat and so on, giving the effect that the melody begins in a different place, when in fact it has remained constant. Much like the changing of sections in African drumming, where the master drummer would sound continuous 8th notes to signal the change, Reich decided in this piece that he would use the metallophone to signal the changes allowing the musician to continue listening as audible cues become part of the music (Reich, 1976).
During this era, Reich became more and more interested in his own ethnic and religious background, and this lead to his study of Hebrew cantillation. After studying the African/Balinese/Indian music for so many years, and noticing the preservation of traditions within this music, he realised he had lost touch with his own. Reich had lost interest in Judaism early in his life but felt that at this point, he could start studying once more. He began studying Hebrew and Torah at the Lincoln Square Synagogue in Manhattan where he quickly learned of the ‘chanting’ of the Hebrew Scriptures. He was interested in the biblical accents or ta’amin, and his teacher informed him that these were the musical notations for the chanting. Reich continued this study into 1976 and 77 in both New York and Jerusalem where he worked with various musicologists and cantors. It was however, just as A. M. Jones book Studies on African Music, played an important part in Reich’s unravelling of the African rhythms, another book, Jewish Music by Abraham Idelsohn (1929), took control of Reich’s study. (Reich,1977).
The word ta’amin translates to “taste of the writing” or “taste of scripture” and in his essay Hebrew Cantillation as an influence on Composition, Reich quotes the Talmud (a central Jewish learning text); “he who reads Torah without tune shows disregard for it” (Bab, Megilla, 32a) Upon learning that within his own ethnic roots, there is a way of notating and reading scripture as music, with a strict set of rules, Reich must have began to explore the techniques and utilise them in his own music. Reich’s teacher, Cantor Edward Berman taught him the ta’amin for Torah by reading and singing them, but also through a written table of modern notation for each of the ta’amin. Reich’s reaction to his study of Hebrew cantillation was the same as the conclusions he drew from studying African drumming and Balinese Gamelan:
It seems far more fruitful and certainly more substantial to try and understand the structure of Hebrew cantillation, to apply that to the pitches and timbres one has grown up with, and so hopefully to create something new (Reich, 1977).
This can be heard in the way Reich constructs the flute and piccolo parts in his 1979 piece, Octet (Reich, 1977. p114). In 1981 Reich composed another piece influenced by his learning while studying Hebrew cantillation. This was Tehillim but did not show the influence in as obvious as way that Octet did. Reich originally wanted to compose to texts in the book of Jonah, but soon realized that the chants of these texts were still preserved in western Synagogues, and so to try to re-create these would be against Reich’s philosophy of composing. It would be like composing a piece of music in African structure, with African instruments etc.
Just as I had found it inappropriate to imitate the sound of African or Balinese music, I found it similarly inappropriate to imitate the sound of Hebrew cantillation (Reich, 1982)
In Reich’s eyes, this achieves nothing new and so would be pointless. Reich instead, for Tehillim, used Psalms, for which the cantillation had been lost, so he was free to compose without “the constrictions of a living oral tradition over 2,000 years old to either imitate or ignore” (Reich, 1982).
While in the early 1960’s, Reich’s first attempts at setting poetry to music were unsuccessful; he instead began using actual recorded speech that was successful (It’s Gonna Rain, Come Out). He was drawn to the literary works of William Carlos Williams particularly, but found when trying to set his words to music that “the failure was due to the fact that this poetry is rooted in American speech rhythms and to ‘set’ poems like this to music with a fixed meter is to destroy the speech quality” (Reich, 1965). Finally, in 1982, Reich began work on a piece in which he would manage to set parts of Williams’s poems (The Orchestra, Theocritus: Idyl I – A version from the Greek, and a small part of Asphodel, That Greeny Flower), which he also named after Williams book of poems: The Desert Music (1984). “As Reichs harmonic, melodic, and timbral resources have expanded in recent years, so have his formal structures” (Schwarz, 1990). In this piece Reich builds on the arch form (A-B-A) that he first uses in Music for 18 Musicians. The Desert Music is built out of five movements in the arch form, A-B-C-B-A, which are identified by tempo and harmonic cycle. The first and fifth movements (A) are fast, and the second and fourth movements (B) share a moderate tempo. The third movement (C) is built out of an A-B-A arch within itself where A is slow and B moves back to the moderate tempo heard in the second and fourth movements. The tempo changes are made by metric modulation in the ratio 3:2 (dotted quarter notes become quarter notes etc.) and the piece is played without pause. “The five-movement arch form is a kind of elaboration of ABA… I was introduced to it in Bartok’s Fourth and Fifth Quartets, which made an enormous impression on me when studying at Julliard” (Reich, 1987). In a similar fashion to Music for 18 Musicians, Reich uses the pulsing technique to establish harmony throughout the piece. However, while harmony for each movement is established, Reich leaves us with a sense of ambiguity as to where the cadences fall within the piece. By the third movement, there seems to be no harmonic centre for the piece, and it is not until the final movement that we eventually hear the cadence from an F altered dominant to D dorian minor. The piece ends on a chord made up of G, C, F and A which are common tones in the A altered dominant (the only chord heard in all five movements), D dorian minor and a possible F major. “The piece therefore ends with a certain harmonic ambiguity, partially, but not fully resolved” (Reich, 1984).
Reich continued to find inspiration in his roots, following on from Tehillim, which arose from his lust for knowledge about his Jewish descendents, The Desert Music, reflecting his passion for Williams’s poetry. In 1988 Reich composed a piece influenced by the train journeys he made as a young Jewish boy from 1939-1942 between his parents homes in New York and Los Angeles. Reich reflects in his Writings on Music; “While these trips were exciting and romantic at the time, I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride on very different trains”. Thus the title of the piece: Different Trains (1988). The new technique that Reich uses to compose this piece has its roots with some of his first major works (Its Gonna Rain and Come Out), where “the basic idea is that speech recordings generate the musical material for musical instruments” (Reich, 1988). He gathered recordings from: his governess reminiscing about their train trips together when he was a boy; a retired Pullman porter who used to ride the same line between New York and Los Angeles; Holocaust survivors speaking about their experiences and American train sounds from the 30’s and 40’s. Out of these recordings, he was able choose samples of speech that were well pitched enough for him to transcribe onto a stave, for a string quartet to double. Different Trains is divided into three movements, although the tempo changes frequently within each movement, the three sections are reminiscent of different periods of the war:
1. America – before the war
2. Europe – during the war
3. After the war
The piece thus presents both a documentary and a musical reality, and begins a new musical direction. It is a direction that I expect will lead to a new kind of documentary music video theatre in the not-too-distant future (Reich, 1988).
Reich does go on to pursue this new direction with, Beryl Korot in 1993 with The Cave. The Cave is a documentary of a story in the Bible, where Abraham buys a cave for the burial of his wife Sarah. This becomes his, and all his descendents resting place as well, and is thought also to be the resting place of Adam and Eve. The cave is now inaccessible but in the 12th century there was a mosque built on the site. The Jews are descendents of Abraham through his son Isaac, where as the Muslims trace there lineage back to Abraham’s son Ishmael, who was born to Hager. “The site remains unique as the only place on earth where Jews and Muslims both worship” (Reich, 1993). In this piece Reich draws inspiration from the recent Different Trains (1988), building on techniques that he first used in that piece, and combining them with techniques that Beryl Korot used in her ‘groundbreaking’ multi-monitor video installations Dachau (1974) and Text and Commentary (1977). The Cave is in three acts, where in each act, the same questions are asked to a different group of people:
- Who for you is Abraham?
- Who for you is Sarah?
- Who for you is Hagar?
- Who for you is Ishmael?
- Who for you is Isaac?
These questions were asked to Israelis, Palestine’s, and Americans. Reich builds on the technique he first uses in Different Trains (1988) where the melody of recorded speech is double and harmonized by musicians. This makes up the majority of the music in the piece, and is all drawn from original documentary interviews. In his Writings on Music 1964-2000, Reich gives an example of how he selected certain speech fragments from the interviews and recordings: He found that the acoustical resonance of the mosque built on top of where the cave lies, was a drone in A minor, so he looked for significant phrases from the interviews that were also in this key. This allowed the music and speech to cadence in A minor at the end of Acts I and II. Included in the 17 musicians performing the piece are 4 singers who sing a chorus of biblical text (Act I), double the words said by the interviewees (Act II) and both in Act III. This is a technique that can be said to have its roots in Drumming.
Reich began his musical journey by accident; experimenting with tape machines in the early sixties he found that phasing two repeating identical phrases against each other created a new sound that he had never heard before. Experimenting with tape allowed Reich to realize ideas that at first had to come out of the machine, and then transfer these ideas to instrumental music “that I never would have got to by looking at any Western of non-Western music” (Reich, 1971). Reich refined and worked at his technique eventually taking it to live performance with Piano Phase (1967). As this essay has shown, his works grow out of each other through experimentation and by recycling of old techniques with new ones; Reich continually pushes the boundaries of minimalist music. In 1968, Reich wrote his essay Music as a Gradual Process, where he stated:
I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music. To facilitate closely detailed listening a musical process should happen extremely gradually.
This approach the composition rang true throughout all of Reich’s compositions before he wrote this essay, but does it still apply to his more recent compositions? Reich used his phasing technique in the majority of his pieces up until 1971, and decided that he would not use it as a technique in composition from then on. Instead he turned to working with non-Western structures such as that of an African drumming ensemble, with western timbre and tonality. He always wanted to create a new sound with every new technique he incorporated into his music. Reich was showing less concern for the “audible process” that is heard in his earlier compositions and the start of his utilization of richer textures, instrumental and vocals, and harmony as a structural tool.
Reich is obviously less concerned now that all elements of a musical process clearly be perceptible. The fact that Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ is still conceived of as a gradual process work is not to be denied; yet the complexity of the texture conceals the procedure (Schwarz, 1981).
Reich’s works gradually moved away from his Music as a Gradual Process philosophy and began to reflect his own roots. This began to bring out more personal music such as The Desert Music (1984) and Different Trains (1988). Reich had already succeeded in composing impersonal music with his early techniques with It’s Gonna Rain (1964) and Come Out (1966), and these earlier tape composition’s set him apart from other composers around him at the time. “When you discover a new idea, it may be very important to present that idea in a very forceful and pared-down way” (Reich, 1976). As Reich’s intentions and directions became clearer, it allowed him to move on and expand his compositions. The listener is less likely to hear the process happening, but it is not essential for them to hear it to enjoy the music. This is a result of Reich’s use of richer texture and increasing numbers in his ensemble. “It seems clear that Reich was, between 1971 and 1974, moving towards a distinct change of style, one made manifestly clear by Music for Eighteen Musicians (1976)” (Schwarz, 1981). He is no longer concerned if the listener can or cannot hear the processes within his music, but liberating himself from strict structures that he had previously set. “There’s no point in simply rehashing those same principles in another orchestration” (Reich, 1976). It is in this sense that the evolution of Reich’s compositions can be thought of as a gradual process in itself, as he slowly opens new doors, discovering new techniques and refining them over and over. From Its Gonna Rain (1964) to The Cave (1993), Reich has shown how a composer can expand his works from one idea, to a vast collection of personal works.
