Last week saw Steve Reich address the Red Bull Music Academy, talking to participants extensively about his life and work.

Reich – pronounced Reish – is the world’s greatest living composer, a musical innovator who changed the course of 20th century music, in some ways even defined it. First emerging in the 1960s with his incendiary, groundbreaking tape-loop pieces It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out, Reich, together with La Monte Young and Terry Riley, was instrumental in bringing ideas of repetition and stasis – minimalism – to the world stage.

Though he later disowned the term “minimalism”, it’s the radical, undulating simplicity of Reich’s work which has proved most influential to the pop and electronic spheres, paving the way for kosmische synthesizer music, techno, house, ambient and much else besides. By the time Brian Eno brought Reich’s early ideas to the rock mainstream via his Discreet Music LP, Reich had already moved on, abandoning the phasing techniques of his own invention and focussing instead on pieces for classical instrumentation inspired, in part, by the action of machines. His most famous work is the shimmering, pulsating Music For 18 Musicians, which was first released by ECM, 1978 (you can listen a lengthy excerpt of the latest recording here). Listening to it now it’s abundantly clear why, without Reich, we’d never have had Philip Glass, Eno, Manuel Goettsching, Throbbing Gristle, Aphex Twin, Carl Craig.

At the age of 74, Reich remains a spry and cheerful figure, fiercely intelligent and energised but also disarmingly casual, a true New Yorker. With his customary baseball cap firmly on head, he spoke passionately and piquantly to the RBMA participants about his early works, the influence of Ghanaian music and John Coltrane on his own compositional approach, and the changing role of electronics in contemporary culture. Below is an excerpt from the lecture transcript; three short video clips from the lecture are embedded throughout the article, and if you want to watch the whole thing you can do so here.





In his book The Rest of Noise, Alex Ross quotes Debussy saying that the job of the producer is to point the way to an imaginary country, that place which is off the map. Perhaps you can tell us how far off the map you were when you began making music?

“I never thought of it that way [laughs]. As a kid I took piano lessons, and then, when I was fourteen years old, for the first time I heard The Rite of Spring, the 5th Brandenburg concerto and bebop – Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and the drummer Kenny Clark. I had a friend who was a better piano player than me, he was playing some jazz, and he said, ‘We’re forming a band, we need a drummer,’ and I said, ‘I’m it.’ So I began studying drums at fourteen with Roland Kohloff, who became the timpanist with the New York Philharmonic but also played a local movie house with glow-in-the-dark sticks at midnight…this was back in 1950.

“I didn’t start with tape – tape didn’t exist. When I was in high school, someone said, ‘hey, there’s a tape recorder’ and I said ‘what’s that?’ and he said ‘well, you can actually record something into it…’ When the American army went into Germany after the war, they discovered that the Germans had built tape recorders. The first recorder that I saw was called a Wollensak, and that’s actually what I used when I did It’s Gonna Rain.

When you first came across the tape recorder, what was your impression?

“Well, it was cheap: you could buy it. Wallensaks and – I think – Revere were the first home machines. Radio stations obviously had them [tape recorders]; in those days Ampex was the big brand, they’ve long since disappeared. To begin with I just used to record some playing or record my voice or whatever, but I started getting used to it when I moved to San Francisco in 1961-62.

“I was studying with Luciano Berio, the Italian composer, and what he was working on at that time was a piece called Omaggio a Joyce (as in James Joyce). What was that? His wife, Cathy Berberian, who was a really good singer, was reading bits of Joyce and he was cutting up the tape into little pieces, phonemes, which was what the book was really about anyway – this was far out, non-narrative writing – so basically you were just hearing the sound of [words], and not focussing on their meaning. I thought it was interesting.

“Then he played us two pieces of Stockhausen, one piece was called Electronic Studies, and the other was called Gesang der Junglicke, and my ear just went [makes whooshing sound] to Gesang der Junglicke. Why? Because there was the voice of a young kid [cut up], and I began to realise: I’m not interested in electronics, and I was never interested – and am still not interested – in synthesis. Couldn’t care less. It’s a marriage of convenience, but I don’t like it. I am interested, really, in analogue sound. So when the sampler was invented I said, OK, that’s for me [laughs].

“I’m not interested in electronics. I am interested, really, in analogue sound. So when the sampler was invented I said, OK, that’s for me.”

“Another thing that was in the air in the late 50s and early 60s was tape loops. With reel-to-reel tape you could put it in a splicing block and literally splice the beginning to the end of a 3″ or 6″ or 7″ piece of tape. And these small tape recorders that I’m talking about, the head assembly was small enough that you could fit the loop over it, press the go button and it would compress up against the head and play back. You’d be recording at seven and a half inches per second, and you got very unusual results that nobody, at that point, had ever heard.

“At that time I also became aware of African music, West African music, both by listening to recordings and by discovering a book called Studies in African Music, which was the first book of accurate scores of music from Ghana. If you’re familiar with musical notation, you’ll see basically divisions into sub-divisions of 12, patterns of three beats, patterns of four beats, patterns of six beats, patterns of 12 beats. But what’s strange [with West African music], is you think, where’s the down-beat? Where’s one? Well, the rattle has it here, this drummer has it there, that drummer has it there – and that’s from Mars, you know? When you listen to rock, you know, generally you’re in 4/4 and everyone knows where one is. Here’s a music where there is no one downbeat – there are multiple downbeats depending on the player, and they just feel it that way. So when I was working with multiple tape loops and hearing this, I was saying, ‘Hey – what have I got here? Mechanised Africans.’[laughs]”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.