Rethinking Reich

Home , Different Trains, The Cave (opera), The Desert Music

“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, theNew 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

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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 engaged 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 concentration 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 Freeman for a Kronos Quartet piece (which becomes Different Trains) May 1987 Reich acquires Casio FZ- 1 digital sampling keyboard, which becomes a crucial technological element in Different Trains and The Cave December 1987 First Intifada begins in Israel- Palestine; Reich and Korot view documentary material of Holocaust and World War II; Reich decides to use the Freeman commission as a test run for his theater piece; Reich listens to and conducts interviews for Different Trains March 1988 Reich explores possible ensemble combinations and video equipment April– May 1988 Renée Levine [Packer] signs on as producer Fall 1988 Reich secures commission from Klaus- Peter Kehr of Stuttgart Opera November 1988 Reich and Korot decide on subject matter for The Cave and begin searching for collaborators Winter– Spring Early drafts ofThe Cave’s synopsis 1989 May– June 1989 Reich and Korot make two trips to Israel-Palestine to conduct interviews Early 1990 Korot and Reich decide to focus act 3 on interviews with US Americans April 1991 Act 1 is completed June 1991 Reich and Korot return to Israel- Palestine for further interviews Fall 1991– Winter Act 2 is completed 1992 March 1992 Interviews in New York April 1992 Interviews in Austin, Texas February 1993 The Cave is completed May 1993 Premiere of The Cave at the Wiener Festwochen

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Holocaust talking about their lives. That’s real. In other words, I’m opposed to acting. I don’t want to see a movie about the Holocaust. But I’ll see lots and lots of documentaries about it. . . [Beryl and I] share that interest, that fascination with dealing with documentary material, which is very oftenloaded .9 Reich made little headway on his project until the late 1980s, in part because the technology he needed to realize his vision did not yet exist. Prior to that time he was still considering World War II in general—and the atomic bomb in particular, according to director Peter Sellars—as a possible subject for his music theater piece, even though his interest in those subjects had already resulted in a large- scale choral composition, The Desert Music (1983), and would later resurface in his second video opera, Three Tales (2002).10 Rising Arab-Israeli tensions in the 1980s, however, increasingly attracted Reich’s attention, and the start of the First Intifada in 1987 likely cemented his interest in the Middle East conflict as a subject matter befitting his self-described “revolutionary” music theater work.

From the Middle East to America: The Political Evolution of The Cave

When an Israeli military vehicle collided with Palestinian cars in the Gaza Strip on December 8, 1987, it triggered a wave of Palestinian protests that eventually transformed into a sustained, six-year struggle that thrust the Palestinian-Israeli conflict into the international spotlight once again. Against the global backdrop of this First Intifada, Reich and Korot conceived The Cave. The official narrative of The Cave’s birth— that its subject matter was first decided at Ellen’s coffee shop in November 1988— underplays the extent to which The Cave can be mapped against the geopolitical terrain of Israel and the United States in the 1980s. Reich had been casting about for a theatrical subject since the early 1980s, and the decisive steps he began to take toward the project in 1988 indicate that he had found one. In April of the same year, Reich met with Renée Levine [Packer], who would go on to produce The Cave; in the fall, he secured a commission from Klaus- Peter Kehr of the Stuttgart Opera.11 Reich’s interest in exploring the Middle East conflict, however, stretched back to at least the mid- 1980s. In a Macintosh computer file titled “Abraham & Nimrod,” Reich had jotted down ideas of possible historical lineages that could illustrate the Israeli- Palestinian conflict (see Table 4.2).12 This document points to two key aspects of Reich’s perspective on the Arab- Israeli situation. First, the composer viewed the conflict—and perhaps its resolution—as rooted in religion; and secondly, he saw its effects being played out in the United States. In one untitled column, Reich placed Abraham and Maimonides, an eleventh- century Sephardic Jewish philosopher and Torah scholar who lived in Spain and Africa

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Table 4.2 Fragment from “Abraham & Nimrod” (Steve Reich Collection, PSS) Untitled Column Untitled Column Abraham Nimrod Maimonides???? Wagner - (Words of “Der Judentum in der Musik” sung to melody of Walkyrie, or other) Jesse Jackson/ Farakan [sic] under Muslim rule. In another column, Reich listed Nimrod, who— according to Jewish and Islamic tradition— was a sort of polytheistic foil to the monotheist Abraham. Under Nimrod, Reich also listed Wagner (a well- known anti- Semite), the outspoken American politician Jesse Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam. Although the left-hand column lacks a figure to balance Jackson and Farrakhan, farther down in the document Reich noted the possibility of using American jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, writing, “Black contrast to Jackson— not King or Malcolm. Coltrane? Need to find interview of his to see what’s to be quoted.”13 The juxtaposition of Farrakhan and Jackson with Coltrane in Reich’s notes points to the composer’s awareness of the spillover effect of the Middle East turmoil in America. As intermittent violent clashes erupted in Israel and the Occupied Territories in the 1970s and 1980s, national discourse in the United States concerning Israel became inflamed, particularly in exchanges between African American and Jewish communities.14 Increasingly, some black communities began to view the Palestinian conflict as an anticolonialist Third World struggle by a darker, oppressed majority against a whiter, subjugating mi- nority. The Six Day War in the spring of 1967 led to an anti- Israel statement by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (a leading Civil Rights Movement organization), and the 1977 election of the conservative Likud party in Israel— criticized by opponents as an inhumane regime— raised tensions between the two communities. Inflammatory, anti-Semitic rhetoric from black nationalists such as Farrakhan and Leonard Jeffries in the early 1980s marked a further dis- integration of black- Jewish relations. During Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential run, Farrakhan’s remarks in particular exacerbated the former’s already strained relationship with the Jewish community as a result of the “Hymietown” controversy.15 And at the Democratic National Convention in 1988, during Jackson’s second run for presidency, his was the only campaign to endorse a resolution calling for Palestinian self-determination. Even in Reich’s earliest exploration of the Jewish- Muslim conflict, then, he framed it through an American lens. Reich’s growing interest in the Arab- Israeli conflict conforms to a larger trend in the 1980s of increasing Jewish American interest in the state of Israel. Whereas the vast majority of American Jews in the 1950s and 1960s did not consider support for Israel to be an essential part of their Jewish identity, after

“We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece” 99 the Six Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, American Jews’ relationship with Israel changed dramatically.16 Concerns over Israel’s vul- nerability in the Middle East after its narrow 1973 victory, coupled with fading international support for the Jewish state, led to concerted efforts among many American Jewish leaders to mobilize support within the United States. At the same time, US politicians and government officials looking to revive flagging beliefs in America’s moral superiority and exceptionalism latched onto the Holocaust— and, consequently, America’s role as liberator—as an element of national identity.17 Although Reich’s first attention to Israel stemmed largely from a turn toward his Jewish roots in 1975 and a scholarly interest in the history and technique of Hebrew cantillation, through his visits to Jerusalem in the late 1970s he would have experienced firsthand aspects of Palestinian-Israeli tensions.18 Moreover, through his affiliation with the Lincoln Square Synagogue he likely would have been sensitive to religious Zionists’ continued role in the development of the state of Israel; the Modern Orthodox synagogue’s founding rabbi, Shlomo Riskin, left his position in 1983 to become the chief rabbi of the new West Bank settlement of Efrat.19 Despite the conflict’s contemporary resonance in the United States, Reich emphasized the importance of engaging with the Torah, Koran, New Testament, and Midrash, which he felt would allow him to “get [a] perspective on [the] roots of [the] problem in [the] Middle East.”20 In the same computer document, he reminded himself to “Go back to [the] original Midrash” and “Let ‘continuity’ come from there.” This focus on the religious roots of the conflict continued throughout the development of The Cave, giving Reich and Korot an oppor- tunity to express their own views of the Jewish- Muslim conflict and, more important, its resolution. In framing the present- day clashes as the manifestation of what was once the familial conflict of a “broken” family, they shift the focus to what ultimately connects the two sides. “The bottom line,” Reich noted in 2016, “is that, yes, there’s a religious war going on in the Middle East, of which the chapter in Israel is played out by the Israelis and the Palestinians, but these characters [Abraham and his family] are very much progenitors. And over here [in the United States], people who don’t really understand that don’t really understand what’s going on in the Middle East.”21 Reich’s evolving descriptions of The Cave following his November 1988 meeting with Korot provide further windows into his goal of creating a revolutionary music theater work, as well as his shifting sense of what was politically viable in theater.22 Reich tied his exploration of Abraham to the modern history of the state of Israel in an undated outline of the work that is likely one of the earliest, based on its content. In it, he envisioned computer word screens that would convey sacred texts such as the Torah, Koran, and New Testament, and contemporary secular sources such as newspaper and magazine clippings. In addition, audio- and videotape would be used to provide a fuller account of Israel’s founding, Arab opposition to it, and—notably— German concentration

100 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns camps. This outline, even more than other sketches and descriptions, reveals the strong thematic tie between The Cave and Different Trains, which Reich initially viewed as a trial run for his first music theater work. The juxtaposition of the Arab- Israeli conflict and the Holocaust suggests that Reich either viewed the latter as a key historical event in the creation of Israel or, more pessimistically, as a cautionary tale of what could happen if Arab opposition to Israel became over- whelming. In addition, by focusing on Israel from the moment of its modern- day founding in 1948, Reich sidesteps direct engagement with the Zionism that informed the persistent small- scale Jewish immigration to then- Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century and growing Arab opposition to it. Despite the seeming emphasis on conflict found in this early outline, one of the first prose descriptions ofThe Cave, created in early 1989, suggests that Reich and Korot were explicitly invested in creating a work that would help to negotiate and reconcile Jewish-Muslim tensions. The pair subtitled their prose introduction to The Cave “Reconciling the Family of Man.”23 In a slightly different project description sent to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (an eventual co- commissioner), Reich and Korot wrote, “The present strife surrounding the cave and the conflicting views of Abraham / Isaac on the one hand and Ibrahim / Ishmael on the other leads us to search for a time and place when Jews and Muslims lived in relative harmony,” such as Cordoba, Spain, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, or large Western cities such as New York, London, and Paris in the present day.24 After exploring these historical sites of peaceful coexistence in act 2 of The Cave, in act 3 the team had planned to ask the Jewish and Muslim interviewees from act 1 “if there is a way for Jews and Muslims to live in close proximity without physical strife.”25 Along with documenting historically peaceful interactions between Muslims and Jews, Reich planned to explore the concept of dhimmi, a political status whereby non- Muslims living under Muslim rule are afforded certain rights and protections, such as independent, non-sharia courts.26 Using interviews with Palestinian Arabs and with Jews who lived in Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, and other Islamic countries prior to emigrating to Israel after its creation, Korot and Reich intended to examine one obvious precedent for largely peaceful— if not per- fectly equitable— coexistence. Although the idea of exploring dhimmi status does not offer any firm insight into Reich’s political leanings, it is notable insofar as the historical Muslim- Jew power imbalance reified by the dhimmi concept inverts the asymmetric political relationship between Israelis and Palestinians in the 1980s. In the work’s final form, however, Reich and Korot left out this -po tentially provocative idea. The development of the third act reveals the greatest political transformation in The Cave between its conception and its premiere. In early descriptions of The Cave, the final act was to focus on the present- day situation, asking whether or not a resolution to the Arab- Israeli conflict was contained in the history and texts (the Torah and Koran) presented in the first two acts. In these descriptions,

“We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece” 101 the repeated emphasis on the familial ties between both Jews and Muslims suggests that Reich and Korot, at least, believed that such a resolution was possible. Yet as they began the process of interviewing, transcribing, editing, and composing, the third act shifted away from directly addressing the question of Jewish- Muslim coexistence. Instead, by early 1990 the team had decided to turn their attention in act 3 to the United States and Europe, to metaphorically “turn the cameras back on the audience” with interviews that provided a “cross- section of Western opinion.”27 Tellingly, however, Reich and Korot refrained from exploring the hypercharged political manifestations of black-Jewish tensions in the United States that Reich had outlined in the mid-1980s. Instead, in its final iteration, the third act consists solely of wide-ranging American responses—sometimes uninformed, sometimes humorous— to the questions posed to Israelis and Palestinians in the previous acts. According to Korot, this American perspective was fundamental to The Cave:

[Act 3 focused on America] because we’re Americans, because that’s where we’re from and that’s the culture we know best. We don’t know the culture in the Middle East like we know the culture here. We say we are a Judeo- Christian culture, but how many people know the roots of our story that lies in the Middle East, in that particular place? In 1993, the role of religion in culture was even further removed from common dialogue than it is now. I can’t even remember that we didn’t know somehow we were going to come back here and do that. We weren’t sure how or what or where we were going to do it, who we were going to ask, but . . . it was just unsatisfying as we developed the work that it [did] not [return to America]. We were greatly relieved when it did come back here, and that also added the fresh take that only America can offer. . . . For us, the third act opened up a door to how complex the sources are and where they go in time and how they travel and change.28

Given that the work was ultimately designed for American and European audiences and conceived within the context of American culture, the third act’s turn to the United States maintains a certain consistency. In Korot’s recollection, the piece seems to have stemmed from a need to examine how Americans un- derstood and reacted to the Arab- Israeli conflict and how attitudes in the United States differed from perspectives in the Middle East. Although the reasons behind the gradual political evolution of the piece remain tantalizingly unknown, concerns over issues of Islamic— and perhaps even Jewish— reception likely played some role. On more than one occasion Reich noted his fear of suffering a fate similar to that of British author Salman Rushdie, whose 1988 novel The Satanic Verses prompted Muslim protests, death threats, and, for the writer, several years of hiding. When composing the opening music of The Cave in April 1989 and considering the implications that orchestration might have for characters, Reich admonished himself in his notes, “Remember

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Rushdie!”29 Intriguingly, Reich’s worry was a potentially negative reaction not to his musical portrayal of Abraham, Hagar, or Ishmael but to that of Sarah, whose advanced age and infertility he had considered illustrating via the use of a guiro. By 1990, Reich publicly disavowed any political motivation whatsoever, claiming, “We are not trying to make a political piece, we don’t want to make enemies like Salman Rushdie did, and political pieces get dated.”30 While Reich characterized the project’s politics— or purported lack thereof— with this oblique reference to Muslim fundamentalism, he and Korot also went to great lengths to ensure The Cave was sensitive to Islamic and Jewish perspectives, screening the work for Jewish and Muslim religious leaders and scholars in ad- vance of the premiere.

“Reconciling the Family of Man”: The Cave as Arab- Israeli Conflict Resolution

Despite Korot and Reich’s best efforts, politics remain an animating force in The Cave, occasionally visible beneath the documentary veil of objectivity they attempted to cast over the opera. The pair’s impetus to reconcile Abraham’s descendants can be detected in the music, the text, and— most immediately— the narrative structure of The Cave. Indeed, the competing narratives that drive the larger Jewish-Muslim conflict are reflected in the juxtaposition of audiovisual interview fragments. As Carey Perloff, director of the initial production of The Cave, reflected in 2013: [As a director] I am drawn to the collision of ideas and the ways in which live theater can foreground conflict— so The Cave, with its competing narratives about belief, about history, about ideas of morality and justice and religion—fit my thinking beautifully. . . . To me The Cave was about the slippery slope of narrative. About how the stories which a culture tells itself become handed down in sometimes dangerous and ossified ways. . . . Because the piece is built on contradictory narratives and a multiplicity of voices, it shows the myth of Babel in real time: the way that human beings are often divided by their language, and trapped in their own myopic narratives.31 On a structural level, the very act of setting competing narratives side by side can be, in itself, political, and the handling of narratives in The Cave mirrors two distinct approaches to resolving Israeli-Palestinian tensions. Negotiators involved in conflict resolution and reconciliation, particularly in the Middle East, prefer emphasizing coexisting narratives that are recognized and legitimized by both parties in a conflict.32 Insofar as it presents contemporary Israeli, Palestinian, and American narratives in turn, The Cave models this method. A second, longer- term approach to conflict resolution calls for the

“We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece” 103 construction of a single, bridging narrative that encompasses both sides.33 By weaving long-established biblical and Koranic accounts of Abraham and his family— the central narrative of The Cave— through competing narratives of Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans, Reich and Korot highlight a fundamental, foundational myth that might serve as such a bridging narrative. In a 2013 interview, Korot implied that at the time of The Cave’s creation, she and Reich saw the common roots of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity as a potentially positive, unifying force. Pointing to the international community’s increased, often negative, awareness of Islam’s religious roots since the 1990s owing to the rise of radicalism, Korot noted, “We, slightly before that, saw a different message [about Islam] that later came to be more dominant.”34 Even Reich in a 1993 interview confessed that he saw a peaceful message in The Cave: “The traditional Jewish view is that Ishmael’s and Isaac’s presence at their father’s burial was a sign of their reconciliation. And if they could do it, perhaps it suggests Arabs and Israelis can, too.”35 Reich and Korot are careful in The Cave not to dictate how this peace might be achieved; for them, doing so would push the piece from the realm of art into the realm of propaganda. Nevertheless, the central idea of the work’s conclusion— in Korot’s words, “that the simple act of breaking bread with the Other is also the most difficult in so many ways”— is fundamentally about reconciliation.36 Similarly, for assistant director Nick Mangano (who would later direct Three Tales), one of the most powerful themes in The Cave was that “a common religion, a common faith, but then also for some just a common mythology, can actually bring us together rather than further divide us.”37 More specific traces of Korot and Reich’s underlying motivation still exist. In one of the last changes to act 1 before the work’s premiere, Reich amended the final line of the opera’s opening text from Genesis 16. Since composing the movement in 1989, Reich had foregrounded the familial conflict that lies at the heart of the work by ending the movement with only the first portion of verse 12: “And he [Ishmael] will be a man of the wild; his hand against all, and the hand of all against him.” In a late change, however, Reich included the final portion of that verse: “And in the presence of all his brothers shall he dwell.”38 This inclusion suggests a familial cohabitation, perhaps even a peaceful one, that answers in the affirmative the question that Reich initially asked: Can Jews and Muslims live together peacefully? Reich’s translation, likely his own, lends this interpretation even more significance. Whereas most biblical translations in- terpret the final line as a strife- laden coexistence— “he will live in hostility toward all his brothers” or “he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen”— Reich’s rendering, with its seeming emphasis on equality and brotherhood, downplays conflict. Reich’s harmonic structures in The Cave also point toward a conscious effort to reconcile the Jewish and Muslim sides of the Abrahamic family through an intriguing mixing of keys. Reich associated specific keys with each character,

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Example 4.1 Transcription of entry dated July 22, 1990, in Sketchbook [41] (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

using harmonies derived from interviewee speech melodies as a basis for the narrative text sections. For example, in a sketchbook entry dated July 18, 1990, Reich wrote out each harmony from the act 1 movements he had constructed from interviewee responses to the questions “Who, for you, is Abraham?” and “Who, for you, is Sarah?” In an entry four days later (see Ex. 4.1), Reich then chose several of these chords to serve as the harmonic foundation for the “Birth of Isaac” text (Genesis 18:1–2, 9– 14; 21:1– 3). Along with these harmonies, Reich listed the primary keys for each family member (having already transcribed, harmonized, and ordered the speech samples for Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, and Ishmael). Abraham, as father of both Muslims and Jews, occupies two distinct key areas: F major and A minor. As if to emphasize the musical logic between Abraham and Isaac, Reich wrote out the harmonic connection: “Isaac = D mi[nor] relative of F maj[or] Abraham.” Reich’s decision to create a musical connection between Abraham and Isaac, despite having not yet transcribed and harmonized the speech samples for the “Who is Isaac?” section, demonstrates his intention to emphasize the common- ality of these characters, even when doing so challenged his commitment to the primacy of the documentary source material. It also highlights Reich’s un- expected mixing of familial keys. Given both Abraham’s and Sarah’s harmonic associations (F major/ A minor and C major/ A minor, respectively), the in- tuitive key choice for Isaac would be A minor. However, rather than keeping Isaac within the white- key diatonic family and linking Hagar (F major) and Ishmael together in the “darker” flat- key space of F major/ D minor, Reich assigns A minor to Ishmael and D minor to Isaac, thereby mixing the musical bloodlines and ensuring that the Ishmaelite family would not be read as darker or more negative.39 Act 3’s focus on the United States— a stand-in for the larger West— also can be interpreted politically. According to Korot and Reich, the “American” third act functions, in part, as a critique of Western ignorance of foundational

“We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece” 105 cultural myths; avant- garde theater director Elizabeth LeCompte of the Wooster Group, in a humorous reply to the first of the five interview questions (“Who, for you, is Abraham?”), begins the act by asking, “Abraham Lincoln?”40 Yet the American perspective accrues significance beyond what Korot and Reich expressly intended, given that The Cave played solely to Western audiences and arguably helped raise the international profile of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By dramatizing the gap between Middle East tensions and their interpretations in the United States, The Cave might be read as an exhortation to Americans to better understand their country’s increasing involvement in the Middle East.41 The act 3 responses have the added effect of explicitly inserting the United States into the narrative of a long- standing ideological conflict. The structural arrangement of The Cave— the Israeli perspective at the beginning, Palestinian in the middle, and American at the end— implicitly situates the United States as a sort of teleological endpoint to the conflict. This arrangement also mirrors the narrative progression of Different Trains. In that piece, the first two movements present disparate geographic settings (the United States and Europe) during similar times before the narrative returns to America in the third movement, which has the effect of reorienting the traumatic memories of Holocaust survivors as part of the United States’ collective past. This straightforward narrative logic— with the US as endpoint—suggests that the future of (and perhaps the solution to) the conflict in the Middle East might be a kind of Western, American plu- ralism that can accommodate multiple, contrasting narratives. Or, in another possible reading of the third act, the path toward Palestinian- Israeli reconciliation must inevitably lead through the United States. Like Reich’s purported musical objectivity in Different Trains, his and Korot’s apolitical claims about The Cave weaken when confronted with the documentary evidence of its development. Moreover, the very act of creating a work for the theater suggests some sort of political stance, insofar as theater functions, according to historian Baz Kershaw, as “a public arena for the collective exploration of ideological meaning,” in which “the spectator is engaged fundamentally in the active construction of meaning as a performance event proceeds.”42 Measuring the political or social impact of theater or music may prove difficult, but it does not necessarily follow that performance has no tangible effect whatsoever. Indeed, Reich’s association with the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the early 1960s gave him ample models for mixing theater and politics (as well as live music and film), and his and Korot’s formal conversations with audiences after performances of The Cave suggest a tacit acknowledgment on their part of theater’s potential efficacy.43 If The Cave helped to raise the profile of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, it likely did so among the types of musicians, artists, and intellectuals who might engage with Israel- Palestine in the future as artistic creators or as scholar- critics. At the same time, The Cave offered a model for how artists might sidestep controversy while broaching politically sensitive subjects; the vitriolic reception of The Death of Klinghoffer, John

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Adams’s 1991 opera dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict, provides a prime counterexample.44 Although the use of documentary material gives The Cave a patina of im- partiality and objectivity, it also supports a political reading of the opera. Amy Lynn Wlodarski has argued convincingly that Reich’s seemingly unbiased use of documentary material in Different Trains acts as a form of “secondary witness,” in which Reich’s interpretations of Holocaust survivor testimonies are advanced without revealing his own subjective standpoint.45 Such subjectivities also un- derlie documentary theater, where works constructed by juxtaposing documents have a long history of being designed for expressly political purposes. Drama theorist Carol Martin writes in her expansive assessment of documentary theater in the late twentieth century that “as staged politics, specific instances of documentary theatre construct the past in service of a future the authors would like to create.”46 As staged politics, The Cave allowed Korot and Reich to construct both the past and the present in the service of an eventual reconciliation among all of Abraham’s descendants.

Notes

1. Reich and Korot 1994. 2. Documentary theater historian Derek Paget (2009, 235–36) notes that much late twentieth- century documentary theater is built on the belief that a “witness’s claim to authenticity can still warrant a credible perspective” in a mediatized, “post- documentary” culture. 3. Gopinath 2005, 41. 4. L. Austin 1969, 91. The article also included a response from Lukas Foss that prefigured Reich’s statement aboutGuernica . Gopinath has pointed out that the trope of Guernica and its inability to effect political change appeared first in Jean- Paul Sartre’s What Is Literature? (1949) and later in Theodor Adorno’s article “Commitment” (1965). 5. See, for example, “Jonathan Cott Interviews Beryl Korot and Steve Reich (1993),” in Reich 2002b, 72. Reich continued to espouse his “theory of political impotence” during the creation of The Cave (see Schwarz 1989). 6. Cowan n.d. 7. Letter to Betty Freeman from Steve Reich, August 14, 1980, Betty Freeman Papers, Special Collections and Archives, UC San Diego (used by permission). Freeman (1921–2009) was one of the most important American patrons of new music and the arts in the middle to late twentieth century. See J. Johnson 2014. 8. Reich’s interest in video extends back to 1975, the year after he met Korot. See “Videotape and a Composer (1975),” in Reich 2002b, 82– 84. On Korot’s Dachau 1974, see Korot 1976, 76– 77; Godfrey 2007, 140– 67. 9. Steve Reich, phone interview with the author, July 25, 2016.

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10. This recollection from Sellars was made in a conversation with the author on March 30, 2013, in Princeton, New Jersey. Reich and Sellars remained in intermittent contact through most of 1987 regarding a potential theatrical collaboration. An early press description confirms that Reich was still thinking of using World War II as a subject: “His theatre piece will have its premiere at the Stuttgart Opera House in September 1991 and will bring video into play on a grand scale. . . . The subject matter is not yet decided, but it seems likely to be a collage of the type used in Different Trains, and it will follow Desert Music (a setting of poems by William Carlos Williams about the atom bomb) in dealing with the Second World War” (Bowen 1988). 11. When Kehr later took a position with the Wiener Festwochen, the commission followed. On the commissioning and producing of The Cave as an entrepre- neurial enterprise, see Ebright 2017. 12. “Abraham & Nimrod,” computer document, Steve Reich Collection, Paul Sacher Stiftung (hereafter PSS). (All PSS sources appearing in this chapter are used by permission.) This particular document is illustrative of the difficulties posed by working with electronic archival documents. Some portions of this text file do not render properly on the computers at the Sacher Stiftung; they appear as an illegible jumble of numbers, letters, and punctuation symbols. Nevertheless, several portions of the text file are readable. In that sense, these documents are not unlike manuscript fragments in which only a small portion is legible. The dating of these electronic files is also fraught with difficulty. Although the Macintosh operating system lists the date of the file’s creation as October 2, 1986, one of the notes within the document is dated “9/ 24/ 86.” 13. Steve Reich Collection, PSS. 14. C. West 1994, 147– 49; see also Carson 1994. 15. For a summary of the “Hymietown” incident, see Greenberg 2006, 243–44. 16. Novick 1999, 146– 69. 17. Ibid., 155. Invoking the Holocaust became a central strategy in pursuit of this support. See also Finkelstein 2003, 31, 149. Within the context of the 1970s and atrocities committed and endured during the Vietnam War, the representation of the United States as the antithesis of Nazi Germany helped to reinforce perceptions of American goodness (see MacDonald 2008, 1106). 18. There are relatively few specifics about Reich’s trips to Israel. For a general account of these trips and their effect on Reich’s compositions, see “Hebrew Cantillation as an Influence on Composition (1982),” in Reich 2002b, 105–18; Puca 1997. In the 1980s, the Arab-Israeli conflict garnered increasing international attention owing to intermittent violence. Although there were no large-scale conflicts for several years after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, occasional Palestinian ter- rorist attacks and subsequent Israeli military retaliations—fueled in part by Israel’s policy of residency revocation and continued settlement growth in the West Bank and East Jerusalem—precluded serious efforts at peace. For a historical overview of the Arab- Israeli conflict from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, see C. D. Smith 2013, 346– 437; Harms 2012, 117– 67.

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19. Riskin, as well as other rabbis at Lincoln Square Synagogue, served as a Jewish adviser to Korot and Reich during The Cave’s development. Although Reich has never given a public indication of his relationship with Zionism or potential solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Riskin, at least, has implied that the two- state solution is not a viable option (see Maltz 2014). It is worth pointing out, however, that Jewish attitudes in the early 1990s toward potential peace solutions may well have shifted due to the rise in Islamic extremism since that time. 20. Most scholars of the Arab- Israeli conflict reject the idea that the contemporary strife has any ancient, religious roots, arguing instead that it is a distinctly modern, politically born conflict (see, for instance, C. D. Smith 2013, 1; Harms 2012, 1, 3). 21. Steve Reich, phone interview with the author, July 25, 2016. 22. Numerous computer documents at the Sacher Stiftung show Reich experimenting, in prose, with how to structure The Cave and answer its central questions. 23. “Cave,” computer document, Steve Reich Collection, PSS. The only portions of the text that were legible on the Sacher Stiftung computers were the headings for each section. 24. Hamm archives, Brooklyn Academy of Music. Based on similar drafts of the project descriptions at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, the description housed at the BAM archives likely dates from February or March 1989. 25. Ibid. 26. The idea for exploringdhimmi status is referenced in several computer files, including “Historical Outline Revised,” “Historical Outline Revised 2_ 19,” “Questions for Jewish Scholars_x,” and “The Cave-Outline 1_20_ 89” (Steve Reich Collection, PSS). 27. “The Cave- Book Description,” computer document, Steve Reich Collection, PSS. In this document from July 1990, Reich wrote, “We will interview primarily Americans (including Black, Asian and Hispanic interviewees) and also some Europeans, and will aim for a cross section of Western opinion primarily (but certainly not exclusively) reflecting what is presently viewed as a ‘sophisticated and enlightened’ outlook.” 28. Beryl Korot, phone interview with the author, August 19, 2013. 29. Steve Reich Collection, PSS. 30. Daly 1990. Reich also referred to Rushdie in Kidron 1989. 31. Carey Perloff, email correspondence with the author, July 16, 2013. 32. D. L. West 2003, 3. 33. Pappé 2006, 194– 204. 34. Beryl Korot, phone interview with the author, August 19, 2013. 35. “Jonathan Cott Interviews Beryl Korot and Steve Reich on The Cave (1993),” in Reich 2002b, 177– 78. 36. Beryl Korot, phone interview with the author, August 19, 2013. 37. Nick Mangano, phone interview with the author, September 23, 2013.

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38. The final entry in Reich’s 1992 agenda is from October 16 and contains the complete text of Genesis 16:12. 39. Reich had ample speech samples to draw from and was thus able to se- lect those that conformed to his large- scale tonal planning. On Reich’s process of transcribing and arranging, see Ebright 2014, 117– 25. 40. “Jonathan Cott Interviews Beryl Korot and Steve Reich on The Cave (1993),” in Reich 2002b, 175– 77. 41. Overt American political involvement in the Middle East and, more specifi- cally, Israel stretches back to the formation of Israel and the beginnings of the Cold War, when the United States sought to align the new, socialist- leaning Ben- Gurion state with Western interests. On the influence of the United States on Israeli culture and politics, see Segev 2002. 42. Kershaw 1992, 16– 17. 43. On Reich’s work with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, see Cole 2012; Gopinath 2011. Indeed, the direct precedent in Reich’s work for mixing live musical performance with film is his music for Robert Nelson’sOh Dem Watermelons. On the various forms that art’s political efficacy might take, see especially Rancière 2010, 134– 40. 44. On Klinghoffer’s reception, see Fink 2005a; Longobardi 2009. 45. On Different Trains and the idea of “secondary witness,” see Wlodarski 2010. 46. Martin 2006, 10. On the intersections of The Cave and the documentary theater tradition, see Ebright 2014, 133– 43. On the increasing reliance on oral history and the authority of the witness in documentary theater of the late twentieth and early twenty- first centuries, see also Paget 2009, 235–36. On documentary theater, see also Bechtel 2007; Dawson 1999; Youker 2012.