Steve Reich Is Running Strong

Jeff Kaliss on August 26, 2016
Steve Reich | Credit: Jeffrey Herman

It’s a warm and wide-embracing affirmation of your acceptance as a composer when your birthday is marked over many months and miles, around the world.

For Steve Reich, the celebration in the Bay Area starts early, a month ahead of his actual eightieth birthday on October 3. But the timing seems right. It was the Bay Area which sourced his early inspiration and innovation, at Mills College (with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud)  and the San Francisco Tape Center (with Terry Riley, Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, and Ramon Sender)  in the early 1960s. There’s history also in Reich being hosting here by the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas, who ushered Reich into the concert hall back when his welcome by audiences and critics was less than assuredly warm.

Steve Reich

Speaking by phone from his New York residence, Reich recalls partnering with Tilson Thomas as two of the four players on the composer’s Four Organs, while Tilson Thomas was assistant conductor with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. After a 1971 outing in Boston, the piece was transported to Carnegie Hall during the BSO’s subscription series, in 1973. “It was Sunday afternoon, and a very conservative audience,” Reich relates, “and out come these four rock organs [Farfisas], and we start playing. After two or three minutes, the audience realizes the chord is not gonna change, though a lot of things were happening rhythmically, but nobody was paying much attention to that.

“There was rustling and stirring in the audience, and you have to count like a demon in that piece, Michael was counting out loud, ‘one-two-three-four-five.’ And by the time we got done, there was an avalanche of boos and bravos, people arguing with each other. I was white as a sheet! But Michael looked at me and said, ‘This is great! This is history!’ He was immediately thinking back to The Rite of Spring. Harold Schonberg, who was the lead critic of the Times at the time, said something like, ‘it was like putting red–hot pokers under the fingernails of the audience.’”

Michael Tilson Thomas with the San Francisco Symphony | Credit: Kristen Loken

Tilson Thomas continued to champion Reich, at Ojai and after his appointment as S.F. Symphony music director. Jack Van Geem, current chair of percussion studies at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, recalls meeting Reich and performing his music soon after being named principal percussionist with the S.F. Symphony, under Edo de Waart, in 1981. “We did Reich’s Tehllim, and then got into his larger orchestral pieces,” says Van Geem, taking a break in the percussion studio in the Conservatory’s basement. “There was an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, where Terry Gross was asking Steve Reich about how people came to understand his music. He paid our section a very high compliment in saying that outside his own ensemble — Steve Reich and Musicians — the percussion section that did the best with his music was the San Francisco Symphony’s.” At Davies Hall on Sunday, Sept. 11, Van Geem will be one the players on Reich’s Six Marimbas, alongside current S.F. Symphony principal Jake Nissly, percussion section member and former S.F. Conservatory of Music student Raymond Froehlich, and Van Geem’s current students Katrina Shore, Yi-Hsuan Lin, and Diego Becerra.

Eighth Blackbird: Nathalie Joachim, Michael J. Maccaferri, Yvonne Lam, Nicholas Photinos, Matthew Duvall, Lisa Kaplan

Aside from the marimba players, the four-night celebration of Reich at Davies (Sept. 7, 9, 10 and 11) will involve a reduced orchestra performing Reich’s Three Movements and six players partnering with the six members of Eighth Blackbird on Double Sextet. Also booked are the Kronos Quartet, performing Different Trains, and guitarist Derek Johnson soloing on Electric Counterpoint. (On the first night, the Symphony’s Gala on Sept. 7, the program also features Renée Fleming and Susan Graham and music of Rossini. Copland shares the bill on Sept. 9 and 10.) Kronos and Eighth Blackbird have both recorded the Reich pieces they’ll present.

Reich acknowledges that since deactivating his eighteen-member Musicians ensemble in 2006 “to devote my time to writing,” he’s found it “enormously gratifying” to have other groups record and perform his compositions. “I went to Latvia, where they were doing my Music for 18 Musicians, and I knew no one in the room. And they were superb! There are a lot of interesting interpretations of my music, different from my own ensemble’s, and what more could a composer ask for?” Perhaps a more manageable budget? “It’s more practical to pay for one airline ticket and one hotel room [for himself] and to maybe coach, or sometimes perform,” he points out. “And that’s what I’ve done since 2006, is to travel by myself.”

Jack Van Geem

Van Geem looks forward to the composer’s scheduled visit to the Conservatory. “Reich is good for everybody,” he testifies. “I try to teach my students that, if you look at a measure, think of it as a box which can contain a certain amount. If you look at any of Reich’s scores, the time signature is a convenient way to box up elements occurring within that time frame. 4/4 just means there are 16 sixteenth notes in this period of time, but if you look at his score more closely, you see this pattern is starting on the end of two — that’s its downbeat — and this pattern is starting on three! And nobody’s on the downbeat one!”

This rhythmic freedom, Van Geem rightly assumes, was inspired in Reich partly through his experience of West African drumming, where “everybody owns their own rhythm, and you play it with your sense.” When Reich, somewhat later in his career, “added the harmonic element, it just increased the power of what he was doing, infinitely almost. He has a chord, and changes one pitch, which increases the tension of the chord, and just at the right time it pops into the next structure, to give you consonance from the dissonance. And if it’s dissonance and consonance, it’s like a good movie, it holds you, and you want to do it again and again and again.”

Aside from Reich’s liberating effect on music pedagogy, Van Geem credits the composer with “making the percussion section a powerful, equal part of the community of instruments on stage, and in some cases the most important part. His music required violin players to play like percussionists, and he removed our [forced] association with other things, like the military, as in Heldenleben, or dance, as in Bolero. Now it’s for the sake of the joy in the power of rhythm, like in Africa.”

The activities beginning Reich’s ninth decade were already set in place long before his birthday plans. They include his being tapped for the Richard & Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall for the 2016–17 season, which will involve a series of talks and concerts. “It’ll be in a sense musical education, and it’s called Three Generations,” he explains. “The whole point is, when I was a young man, the contemporary musical world was split between allegiances to either Schoenberg or Stravinsky. And Schoenberg’s influence, through Stockhausen and Cage, was powerful but did not interest music lovers. John Adams has said it’s ‘mannerism,’ where art becomes so complex that nobody is following it.

“My generation,” Reich continues, “created a kind of music which is a return to basics, with Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Arvo Pärt — and I’ll kick John Adams up ten years, he’ll only be 70. It’s bringing back harmony, melody, counterpoint, those basic building blocks without which Western music is really crippled. This has become enormously enjoyed, I’m happy to say, around the world, and the good news is that younger composers have listened. Twenty years below us, we have the Bang On a Can group, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon, and several others. But their version is to make something of their own, something very interesting indeed.

“Now let’s go down twenty years below that,” he goes on. “We have another generation, even larger in size, who are taking this material in even more varied directions, and the two I’ll choose to present are Nico Muhly and Bryce Dessner. The good news is that there’s this third generation, with promises of more to come, which makes me and others in my generation feel very, very good. That’s a dream come true.”

Steve Reich, right, performs Clapping Music with London Sinfonietta principal percussionist David Hockings.

Despite arthritis that may limit his own performing (“I’ll probably do Clapping Music as a cameo in San Francisco”), there’s much more to come from this visionary octogenarian himself. “I think I’ve finally figured out how to work with the orchestra in doing what I do best, which is to write large chamber pieces,” Reich says. “I’m about to begin a piece tentatively titled 20 Soloists and Orchestra, where the twenty are already in every orchestra around: the first stand players, the principals and seconds, with two pianists. Basically this is modeled on the concerto grosso, where you have more than one soloist. The rest of the orchestra will have a supporting role, relatively easy to accomplish in rehearsal.

“Then there’s another piece hard to describe, with the visual artist, Gerhard Richter, who’s been interested in music. He’s done a book of patterns which are basically taking one of his abstract paintings and subdividing it on a computer, so musicians will play while his work is projected in the background. It’s clear that his ideas could be adapted to art in time, as well as art in space. After all that, there might be a multiple piano piece, but I’d rather not go into that because the details are unclear.”

More immediately, Reich’s choreographed piece for large ensemble, Runner, will premiere in a Cal Performances program featuring Ensemble Signal on January 29, 2017. The piece was co-commisioned by the Cal Performances to celebrate Reich's birthday. In the force and flexibility of his talent and imagination, this man is still an Olympian.