Rethinking Reich

4 “We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece” The Reconciliatory Aesthetic of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s The Cave Ryan Ebright On February 25, 1994, an American-born Jewish religious fanatic named Baruch Goldstein massacred dozens of Muslim worshipers in the mosque that sits above the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron— the same cave that serves as the subject of Steve Reich and video artist Beryl Korot’s 1993 opera, The Cave. While protests and riots sprang up across the West Bank of Israel- Palestine in the im- mediate aftermath of this event, the New York Times invited Reich and Korot— having recently completed an eight- month European and American tour of The Cave— to respond publicly to the massacre. In an article published two weeks later, the pair felt compelled to dismiss the idea that The Cave, a self- designated “documentary music video theater work” that explores the common ancestry of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, could influence the Middle East peace process. Moreover, they explicitly disavowed art’s capacity to inspire any direct political or social change whatsoever, writing: “Pablo Picasso’s [painting] Guernica had no effect on the aerial bombing of civilians, nor did the works of Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht, and many other artists stop the rise of Hitler. These works live because of their quality as works of art.”1 Taken at face value, this disavowal of art’s efficacy is understandable—what artist would wish that the merit, success, or indeed failure of their work be de- termined by its ability to prevent atrocities? Their statement, however, belies the explicitly political genesis of The Cave, the development of which coincided with rising Arab- Israeli tensions in the 1980s. Early sketches, outlines, and descriptions of The Cave reveal that Korot and Reich, who are married, initially viewed their quasi-opera as a step toward “reconciling the family of man.” By the time of The Cave’s premiere, however, Korot and Reich instead attempted a more detached, apolitical stance, shying away from the fundamental question they had set out to answer: How can Jews and Muslims live together peacefully? Organized in three acts, The Cave tells the story of the biblical patri- arch Abraham, his wife Sarah, her handmaid Hagar, and his sons Ishmael (from Hagar) and Isaac (from Sarah). The title derives from the Cave of the Patriarchs (also known as the Cave of Machpelah), where Abraham and his family are purportedly buried, and which is the only location where Jews and 93 94 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns Muslims both worship, albeit at different times. The Cave recounts their story using texts drawn from the book of Genesis and the Koran, as well as accounts found in the Jewish Midrash and Islamic Hadith commentaries. These texts are presented musically— through various combinations of four singers and 13 instrumentalists— and/ or visually, via five large video screens. Reich and Korot interweave these Abrahamic narratives with collaged sections of audiovisual fragments drawn from interviews with Israeli Jews (act 1), Palestinian Muslims (act 2), and Americans (act 3), who comment subjectively on Abraham and his family. Going a step beyond Reich’s much-lauded Different Trains, which utilized a similar sampling technique, these interview excerpts form both the musical and the visual basis for the entire work. Reich subjects the interviewees’ speech melodies to processes of fragmentation and imitation, using instruments to double or harmonize the melodies, while footage of the interviewees is projected onto alternating screens. In turn, the harmonies derived from these speech samples inform the harmonic progressions of the movements that convey the Abrahamic narrative. Korot, meanwhile, abstracts visual details from the interview footage onto various screens to create a sort of mise- en- scène for each interviewee. The long development of The Cave from 1980 to 1993 provides a window into Reich’s evolving approach to political art and how he and Korot reconcile their political and artistic motivations. Like its aesthetic predecessor, Different Trains, The Cave relies extensively on the rhetoric of witness to establish an aura of objectivity.2 By working within the sphere of recorded documentary material, removing the more politically volatile ideas, and refraining from suggesting a solution to the Arab- Israeli conflict, Reich and Korot preemptively attempted to circumvent any charges of political propagandizing. Even in its final form, however, vestiges of their underlying bid for reconciliation still remain in The Cave’s music, text, and narrative structure. Korot and Reich’s statement in the Times conforms to the latter’s professed attitude toward art and politics— what Sumanth Gopinath has termed Reich’s “theory of political impotence.”3 It echoes remarks that the composer made as early as July 1969 in the avant-garde music periodical Source. In the article “Events/ Comments: Is New Music Being Used for Political or Social Ends?,” which surveyed several contemporary composers, Reich affirmed that although he had never written music for political or social ends, “Certainly any kind of work of art that gets out into the public will be interpreted politically, if there is any possibility of doing it. I think that the politics are more successful when the music comes first.”4 Although not denying the possibility of politically en- gaged music, Reich posits a clear divorce between a work’s musical content—a product of its creator—and its potential political messages, which more often derive from audience perceptions than from an artist’s intentions. Central to Reich’s formulation of music’s political (non)utility is his insistence that artistic or formal ideas for his compositions should precede any ideas of content. In “We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece” 95 his numerous press interviews during the lengthy development of The Cave, Reich took pains to express that despite the contemporary, political nature of the opera’s subject, the aesthetic impetus— combining documentary video and music in a theatrical context— always came first.5 The documentary trail ofThe Cave’s creation suggests a more complex narrative than Reich has provided in his public statements. The origin ofThe Cave dates to June 17, 1980, when Reich lay in a hospital recovering from surgery (see Table 4.1 for a timeline of The Cave’s development). During his convales- cence, Reich spoke with British music critic and minimalist composer Michael Nyman about “this idea for a big theater piece. It seemed very exciting, but very vague.”6 Shortly thereafter, Reich wrote to Betty Freeman, a longtime supporter of his work: I also have in mind to start a H*U*G*E project that will involve live music on stage plus multiple image film. By that I mean dividing a wide screen movie image into as much as 8 separate divisions all in rhythmic relation. I want to use the voices, images and sounds of the World War II period. It will go back to the kind of work I was doing with tape in the 60s (like Come Out) and will be my answer to what music theatre can be.7 While implicitly situating Reich’s project in relation to the burgeoning oper- atic career of his erstwhile colleague Philip Glass, whose Einstein on the Beach quickly became mythologized as having effected a paradigm shift in music theater following its American premiere in 1976, this early description of the project reveals several important facets of Reich’s long- term theatrical pursuit. Most significantly, Korot’s influence is immediately apparent. The division of a widescreen image into multiple partitions in rhythmic relation draws directly on Korot’s pioneering video art installations Dachau 1974 and Text and Commentary. The former utilized four screens to rhythmically interweave video footage of the museum that now occupies what was once a Nazi German con- centration camp.8 The proposed subject also connects to Dachau 1974, and Reich’s letter to Freeman complicates his later assertion that the artistic idea for a theater piece—combining documentary video with music—always preceded the subject matter. From its conception, Reich’s bold artistic vision was matched by an equally ambitious— or, at least, a politically loaded— subject. Using documentary material, the composer later noted, allows Reich to deal with otherwise impossible subject matter. This documentary commitment is what ultimately connects much of his and Korot’s work: I respond to what I, on a gut level, believe is the truth. And I believe in the literal truth. If you want to talk about 9/ 11, I want to hear the voices of the traffic controllers, and the firemen who gave their lives, and the people who were living in that area and were affected by it directly. Not by somebody who’s thinking about it or writing an essay about it. In other words, to me, it’s impossible to deal with the Holocaust. But, you can have people who survived the Table 4.1 Timeline of The Cave’s creation and related political events Date Event June 1980 Reich first records the idea for a documentary music video theater work 1982– 83 The Desert Music uses World War II theme originally intended for theater work Fall 1984 Jesse Jackson supports the formation of a Palestinian state during his first presidential run 1986 Reich develops idea for exploring the familial roots of Jews and Muslims (“Abraham & Nimrod” computer document) 1987 Periodic meetings and conversations with director Peter Sellars (through January 1988); commission from Betty

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