The music of Steve Reich

Steve Reich (1936- ), in his essay “Music as a Gradual Process” (1968), wrote that “a compositional process and a sounding music [...] are one and the same thing.” His aesthetic creed of “perceptible processes,” indicated in these words, is known as the basic idea of minimal music. Although minimal music has been considered a counterpart of minimal art, this essay first appeared in the exhibition catalogue of Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1969), an exhibition recognized as a threshold of postminimalism in the plastic arts. In this paper, I would like to clarify a linkage between Reich’s music and postminimal art in view of his involvement in the Anti-Illusion show.
The theme of the Anti-Illusion show was to refocus on the process of making art. By emphasizing the processes and materials of the works, the participating artists tried to deny illusion and expose the reality of art. Among these works, Reich performed his Pendulum Music, in which he made the sounding process visible as microphones’ swinging. This piece clearly demonstrates that Reich’s claim in “Music as a Gradual Process” was propounded in connection with postminimal art as an attempt to disclose musical processes and thereby reveal the real.

Nel mio percorso artistico-musicale, se pur breve rispetto a tanti altri miei colleghi, ho avuto la fortuna di subire, ricevere ed assorbire le più svariate influenze musicali varianti a seconda degli incontri fatti e dei luoghi frequentati. Lungo il mio percorso formativo, certamente non terminato e lungi da me dal considerarlo fatto per tutto il resto della mia vita, ho avuto a che fare con i più svariati ambienti musicali: da quello prettamente accademico, dove ho avuto la possibilità di conoscere e apprezzare ciò che viene definito musica colta o classica, a quello del mainstream urbano musicale, dove ho potuto allargare i miei orizzonti verso i più svariati generi della musica moderna. Assorbendo ed apprezzando questi due grandi mondi, apparentemente lontani fra loro, il mio sguardo si è improvvisamente arrestato su qualcosa che stava fuori dagli schemi, qualcosa che produceva in me sensazioni varianti tra il dubbio e la curiosità, l’incredulità e la sorpresa. Il mondo etichettato come musica contemporanea mi si era appena aperto davanti dandomi la possibilità di gettarmici dentro e riuscendo a capire subito che, nonostante la sua giovanissima età (circa un secolo di vita), era qualcosa di mastodontico.
In questa mia ricerca ho voluto analizzare solo una corrente culturale, probabilmente la più mistica, della musica contemporanea: il Minimalismo. Partendo dalla nascita e l’evoluzione di essa in vari campi artistici sono giunto alla specifica analisi di un compositore che ha segnato un enorme solco nella storia di questa corrente in campo musicale: Steve Reich.
Leggendo e studiando le analisi del Maestro Enzo Restagno, saggi e note dello stesso compositore, ho cercato di costruire un intreccio fra la biografia e le opere compositive di Steve Reich esponendo infine il pensiero estetico dello stesso.

Depuis une perspective décentrée sur les Etats-Unis d'Amérique, le compositeur Steve Reich, l'artiste On Kawara, les écrivains David Antin, Kenneth Goldsmith, Caroline Bergvall et Rosmarie Waldrop ont créé des oeuvres sui sont aussi des contre-discours par un flirt avec rien. Ils envisagent le rien comme un moteur, "un moteur-désir", dirait Duchamp.
Avec la musique, l'art et l'écriture, cet essai étudie des esthétiques, poétiques, et politiques du "rien dense", celles qui se tiennent au plus près de l'expérience.
Il convient donc d'entendre "à partir de rien" comme un départ, dans le double sens de ce mot: une façon de commencer et, ce faisant, de se dégager de l'idée que "rien" annule le sens.

This article traces Steve Reich through the Bay Area's cultural nexus during the period 1962–65, exploring intersections with Luciano Berio, Phil Lesh, Terry Riley, Robert Nelson, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and the San Francisco Tape Music Center. The aim is to present a revised history of this era by drawing on personal interviews with Tom Constanten, R. G. Davis, Jon Gibson, Saul Landau, Pauline Oliveros, and Ramon Sender. In addition, previously unused source materials and contemporaneous newspaper reception are employed to provide a more nuanced contextual framework. Reich's heterogeneous activities—ranging from “third stream” music and multimedia happenings to incidental scores and tape collage—deserve investigation on their own terms, rather than from within narratives concerned with the stylistic development of “minimalism.” More appropriate and viable aesthetic parallels are drawn between Reich's work for tape and Californian Funk art.

This article explores Steve Reich’s relationship with New York City’s downtown artworld during the latter half of the 1960s, aiming to nuance aspects of early minimalism by tracing diachronic connections with the Park Place gallery, the exhibition ‘Anti-Illusion: Procedures / Materials’, Richard Serra, Sol LeWitt, and movements such as process art and conceptualism. I suggest that, rather than revealing Reich’s prior compositional philosophy, his 1968 treatise ‘Music as a Gradual Process’ demonstrated aesthetic cohesion with the stance of a particular milieu, mirroring a broader linguistic turn in contemporaneous art and revealing a certain discrepancy between theory and praxis. Drawing on newspaper reception I explore Reich’s compositions from Melodica (1966) to Pendulum Music (1968), arguing that these pieces gained both aesthetic value and institutional credibility through being understood in relation to concurrent artwork and ideas, affording productive horizons of expectation.

The field of interactive music systems (IMSs), beginning in the 1980s, is still relatively young and fast moving. The field of music theory-analysis, during the same period (since 1980), has undergone a major transformation in terms of technological innovations, flexibility, and breadth. The two fields have not really caught up with each other. It will be interesting to see what arises as they do — especially as both fields have become more concerned with the role of the body and embodied cognition. Framed in terms of contrasting epistemological orientations, this essay considers some relevant developments in IMSs, music cognition, and music theory and analysis, leading up to the present.  The most popular approaches to music cognition and to IMS design are rationalist (Ashby 2010), exploiting the ‘correct’ embodiments of music (Godøy 2004, Leman 2007, Paine 2009) based on affordances (Gibson 1977, Kelso 1998). This essay, however, advocates a pragmatist (Ashby 2010) approach inspired by music analysis and exploiting the potential of kinesthetic learning (associative learning). Prompted by a progressive approach to music analysis, theory, perception, and cognition (Dubiel 1999, Mailman 2007), interactive music technology can also be constructive, flexible, and progressive, by exploiting kinesthetic learning from immersion in new and unusual motion-to-sound mappings derived from dynamic formal processes in analysed music. In this way, immersive interactive systems offer an opportunity systematically to learn new associations based on principles theorised in response to analysis. Experience of these systems essentially ‘rewires the brain’, thereby exemplifying what Korsyn (2004) has attributed to Lewin’s (1986, 1987) approach to music perception: the ironist approach, as formulated by Rorty (1989). Thus a pragmatist ironist experimental (PIE) approach is articulated. Rather than committing to any particular ways music is already embodied, this approach acknowledges the flexible nature of embodied musical experience. It forges and uses interactive music technologies continually to redescribe and therefore reform how music is embodied, thereby disembodying to re-embody music, expanding how music is heard, contemplated and experienced.

Reich’s My Name Is (1967) has become more widely known through its recent commercial recording by Powerplant (2012), but scholarly discussion of the piece has been until now almost entirely absent, despite the piece having been through a number of versions. The archival materials housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung offer new insight into the work’s compositional journey, from a piece generated by the voices of its audience to an ensemble work consisting of the voices of the performers themselves. What emerges is a tangled narrative of Reich’s views of language, speech, and identity, which materialise through the evolution of My Name Is. One moment stands out in particular in this narrative, a little-known German version of the piece, Mein Name Ist…(Portrait der
Schola Cantorum, 1981), which is a parallel work to an English version produced for Reich’s own ensemble, My Name Is: Ensemble Portrait. The Bayer Records recording of the German piece released in 1993 was subsequently deleted, and Reich’s later comment, ‘Forget this piece, I have’, appears to forbid further scholarly investigation.

This paper offers a close reading of the versions of My Name Is, opening up new perspectives on the composer’s approach to using speech material, and in so doing reassessing the piece’s significance.

Keywords: Steve Reich; My Name Is; Phasing; Tape Manipulation

This article reappraises and develops Marshall McLuhan’s theory of ‘Auditory Space’ as a critical tool for interrogating emergent, immersive modes of new media performance.  Commonalities in the practise of Erwin Piscator, Steve Reich and Beryl Korot are explored, specifically in their respective applications of technology as a means by which to re-present historical events and document lived experiences with political intent. Contemporary views on historiography and historicity are explored and  contextualised with respect to postmodern theory. A performance of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s Three Tales is analysed, in the light ‘auditory space’, with reference to ways in which Three Tales evoke collective memory, to raise political concerns and issues of authenticity and to affect the spectator. Each of these practitioners use contemporaneous technologies to communicate to audiences of their day in ways that suit the tenor and technological environment of their times. These notions are briefly discussed from a historical perspective in relation to theatrical stagings that operate different approaches to illusion or anti-illusion. I draw on Jacques Derrida’s theories of deconstruction and his critique of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. The affective potential of music is assessed using phenomenology as a means through which to describe perceptual modes encountered in multi-channelled performance.

This paper has been accepted for publication in Nicholas Campion (ed.) Heavenly Discourses (Lampeter, Sophia Centre Press, 2015 )

ABSTRACT: In 2009, Forestry Commission Scotland successfully established part of Galloway Forest Park as the first 'Dark Sky Park' in Britain – it is one of the darkest parts of the UK mainland for stargazing. Artist/Composer Chris Dooks is making music from the voices of local astronomers and other patrons of the park. In this paper, he defines the project and contextualises the work with other astromusic that has influenced it, such as: a) The Chromatics, a touring science a cappella troupe; b) Singing Science Records, a vinyl edutainment project of the 1950s; c) The Symphony of Science, ‘The phenomenon of auto-tuning’, featuring Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking. Dooks’ work (more akin to the philosophies of composer Steve Reich) features phrases garnered from astronomer-interviews that are woven into a fifteen-minute, public-domain electronic music piece . The astronomers’ accents and conversation form the motifs, phrases and cadences of the piece. Here, local viewpoints kindle supermassive views. This way of working gives the work both an accessible and otherworldly flavour, linking a kind of regionalism to the universal. In 1995, Dooks made a film (which won a national competition) about the nature of artificial light: ‘Beacons.’ Now, sixteen years later, he complements the work with a piece about the struggle to find darkness in increasingly light-polluted skies. This paper was presented with a semi-live performance in Bristol during the Heavenly Discourses conference, the aim being to compose a warm and potentially emotional response to this precious view of the night sky.

This article deals with the topic of temporality in Steve Reich’s early works, starting from the analysis of It’s Gonna Rain’s sketches held at the Paul Sacher Stiftung. It demonstrates that the technique of phasing came out of an idea of composing and decomposing spatial structures, rather than of a simple mistake or of technological needs. The notion of spatialization of music writing, aiming at the creation of temporal perceptual paradoxes, will be put into relationship with a vectorial, but non protensive and endless conception of musical time.

A recording of the talk, with Powerpoint slides, is available here: https://vimeo.com/111948249?utm_source=email&utm_medium=clip-transcode_complete-finished-20120100&utm_campaign=7701&email_id=Y2xpcF90cmFuc2NvZGVkfDNhMjU1NTBhNDgzZDIxMjRmOWIyYjljMDkzYzdjOTVkMzk3fDMzMjkxNzE5fDE0MTYwOTUwODJ8NzcwMQ%3D%3D

Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians (1974-6) performs a tension between voice and instrument. Reich chose to incorporate vocalists in the piece, but ruthlessly stifled melody by writing repeated notes that would be much more idiomatic on an instrument; he based the form on the length of a human breath, but instructed the vocalists to imitate instrumental timbres as much as possible. The uncanny effect of this tension manifests when the voices join the pulsed texture shortly after the piece begins. In this paper, I argue that Reich uses mechanistic vocal writing to explore the fraught relationship between voice and techné, and I contextualize that experimentation within post-war discourses on music, philosophy, and the voice.

Music for 18 Musicians first sounded during a time preoccupied with the problem of the voice; the 1960s saw Lacan raise it to the status of a “real object,” while Derrida challenged what he saw as Western philosophy’s longstanding bias toward the voice and against writing. Both thinkers endeavored in their own fashion to work through the voice—to call its bluff as the guarantor of presence and humanity, to neutralize its claims as bearer of truth and securer of subjectivity. Musicology’s most impassioned response to this discourse came in the form of Edward T. Cone’s The Composer’s Voice, which constitutes an aesthetic and ethical call to the vocal in music and connects melody to the presence of a human subject.

Reich, too, raises singing as an ethical and philosophical problem: at the same time that he nominally reduces his voices to the sound and status of instruments, he also draws on the longtime association of the voice with subjectivity and transcendence in music most influentially developed by Rousseau. Furthermore, Reich’s vocal ambivalence is not an isolated phenomenon—he is one of many postwar composers who exploit the expressive power of the singing voice even as they intervene, obstruct, and struggle against it. For these composers, music provides the battleground on which an internal conflict over the status and means of expression can unfold and remain endlessly unresolved.

La estetización es un fenómeno presente en gran parte del arte y el pensamiento actuales que puede rastrearse en los escritos de filósofos desde la Ilustración hasta nuestros días. Cuando la experiencia artística es tal que los componentes estéticos se sitúan con preponderancia o sustituyen a los componentes artísticos se produce la estetización. El siglo XX muestra una gran variedad de corrientes artísticas que buscaron nuevos modos de expresión, entre ellas las vanguardias negativas, las cuales encontraron caminos hasta entonces inexplorados, llevando al arte a una "desarticidad" donde la capacidad artística era aplastada por la estética del pensamiento Este hecho también se dio en la música, desde los futuristas italianos a las obras de John Cage o los minimalistas, que fueron referencia de multitud de artistas de la música pop. Este libro analiza el origen de estas corrientes musicales y la influencia que han tenido en la estética y el pensamiento musicales de la segunda mitad del siglo XX.

CONTENIDO:

1. Prólogo
2. La "estetización" como fenómeno en la sociedad actual. Precedentes
3. Primeras vanguardias. Futuristas italianos, dadaístas y surrealistas. Erik Satie y su "Musique d' ameublement"
4. Fenómenos de estetización en la música norteamericana. John Cage y la indeterminación
5. Minimalismo y música repetitiva. La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich y Philip Glass
6. Arte es vida, vida es arte: Fluxus, pop, punk y vanguardias
7. Fenómenos de estetización en la música europea
8. Estetización en la música española. Juan Hidalgo y ZAJ. Carles Santos y Llorenç Barber
9. Caminos del arte: ¿hacia dónde se dirige la música?
10. Bibliografía