My first exposure to you was your experiments with phased tape loops of spoken word, Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain. It was very trippy, but I also found that the repetition made me sit up and pay attention. This was in the early ’70s, in a class in the “Psychology of Mysticism,” at San Francisco State.
[Reich chuckles.] Well, any old way you use it, as Chuck Berry once said. But it isn’t through the repetition that you pay attention; it’s that the repetitions are constantly changing. If it were really just repetition, you’d probably go to sleep or change the channel.
You’d been out here in school yourself, a decade or so earlier, when you started those experiments. What brought you to the West Coast from New York?
Well, my father [Leonard Reich] was not too keen on my becoming a composer. He thought it would have been better if I’d become a lawyer like him.
But your mother [June Sillman Carroll] was a musician, a songwriter [“Love Is a Simple Thing”], and a performer [New Faces of 1952]. You were following in her footsteps.
You got it. So there was this tension, because I really grew up with him [after the parents’ divorce]. I mean, how many people came to California running away from something or other? It was also the age of On the Road, beatniks, and so on.
You enrolled at Mills College in Oakland and studied with Luciano Berio.
While I was not attracted to the serial school, I certainly knew that that was where the action was, so I figured, meet the devil in his den and you’ll really find out what’s happening. ... I learned a great deal from him.
But you consciously set yourself apart from the 12-tone modernist composers.
Every music comes from a time and place. In the ’60s, against a background of “Millions of Burgers Sold” and tail fins, Elvis, Motown, and Coltrane, for them to pretend they’re in the dark-brown angst of Vienna at the turn of the century — it just wasn’t true.
What was the Bay Area like outside the campus?
There were two things I was involved in. One was the [San Francisco] Tape Music Center, on Divisadero Street. The other was the San Francisco Mime Troupe, in its original incarnation, with R.G. Davis. I did the music for their production of Ubu Roi, scored for strummed violin, clarinet, and kazoo, played through a Pacific Gas & Electric megaphone. [Laughs.] I was definitely doing the West Coast deal! And Phil Lesh [later of the Grateful Dead], at that point, was a trumpet player and a student of Berio’s, and he and I got very, very tight; we bought a couple of tape recorders in unison. I used one to make a tape piece in a taxi I was driving, called Livelihood. It was basically a fast splice collage-type piece. My biggest influence in jazz, by far, was John Coltrane. I heard Africa/Brass, which is a half-hour on E. ... But if you have melodic invention, rhythmic complexity (by Elvin Jones and another drummer), and timbral variety via the unusual orchestration, then those musical parameters will make up for the very intense repeated low E.
In your own work, too, does the harmonic restriction elicit expansion in those other areas?
Exactly! And I’ll give you another example, from Motown: a release in ’65 called Shotgun, by Junior Walker. The bass line went like this [he sings a repeated funky pattern]. There’ll never be a B-section! So the tension built up by the fact that there isn’t any change propels him to get more and more intense and melodically inventive on his instrument.
You’ve written about influences from world music. What was it about Balinese gamelan music that impressed you?
You can hear it in a piece like Eight Lines [1979]. The pianos are chattering away, and the strings are playing this 10-bar slow canon. ... There’s a slow movement, if you want to listen to it that way, and there’s a fast movement, if you want to listen to it that way. And that comes out of Bali.
You also went to Africa and studied with a master drummer in Ghana. You’d been a jazz drummer yourself, as a teen.
The effect was not, “drummer goes to Africa and starts writing Drumming” [which Reich composed in 1970-71 and So Percussion performed at Stanford]. It was, “composer who is doing something with rhythmically repeating patterns goes to Africa and gets a huge pat on the back and is told metaphorically, look, this kind of stuff has been going on for thousands of years, you’re on the right track, go home and run with the ball.” Ghanaian drumming is a polyrhythmic music: rhythms that are not in the same place but are fitting together as a sort of displaced jigsaw puzzle.
Up to that point, you didn’t seem much interested in harmonic movement.
But Music for 18 Musicians [1974-76] has got more harmonic movement in the first five minutes than any piece of mine, laid end-to-end, before then: bass clarinets, regular clarinets, four women’s voices, vibraphone, xylophone, marimba, violin, cello. I created a large ensemble. “Ensemble” means one-to-a-part, which is a large chamber group.
But you’ve maintained a distaste for orchestral music.
Take the very famous orchestrations of Bach done by Leopold Stokowski. They’re awful! They’re scored for too many strings. It’s fat, it’s cumbersome. And Bach is very clean, you gotta hear all those lines. ... By and large, especially music after Beethoven, there’s really none of it I ever want to listen to at all.
Why not?
God made me that way.
You’ve evolved your own approach.
Different Trains [recorded with the Kronos Quartet] in the late ’80s was a very, very important piece, kind of putting the early tape approach together with real music. I did The Cave and Three Tales with Beryl Korot [his videographer wife], and City Life on my own, and they all had involved sampling of speech. Since 2002, I’ve been writing exclusively for musical instruments and voices and nothing else. And now I feel like the cupboard is dry.
David Harrington told me you’re writing a piece for Kronos that will involve electronics.
And that means prerecorded voices, again. I want to do the sync soundtrack of a freeze frame, so someone could say “Zerooooooooo” and the o goes on as a tone, and then the violin or viola can double it or harmonize it. I suspect it’ll be centered around 9/11, because we lived for 25 years four blocks from Ground Zero, and my son and granddaughter were there while we were on a six-hour layover. Voices of people who were there — survivors, relatives, young women who said psalms for the dead in a tent. It’s time to deal with something that history has proven is far from gone.