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'A Composer Looks East': Steve Reich and Discourse on Non-Western Music

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'A Composer Looks East': Steve Reich and Discourse on Non-Western Music The African e-Journals Project has digitized full text of articles of eleven social science and humanities journals. This item is from the digital archive maintained by Michigan State University Library. Find more at: http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/africanjournals/ Available through a partnership with Scroll down to read the article. e or so i Witnessed a dramatic increase in scholar- Steve Reich ship on musical minimalism and the music of Steve Reich. Such scholarship includes Edward Strickland's pathbreaking and history of minimalism's origins, Robert Fink's dissertation on musical teleology (which deals extensively with minimalism), Discourse K. Robert Schwarz's popular-press introduction to minimalist composers, and Keith Potter's monograph on the "core" on American minimalists - La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Reich, and Philip Glass. During the last few years in particular, Non-Western scholars have begun to address the question of Reich's use of non-Western music, usually within broader discussions of the relationship between non-Western music and American Music experimental composition. This new attention to minimalism by Sumanth Gopinath <GLENDORA REVIEWxAfrican Quarterly on the ArtsxVol3@No3&4> provides a valuable opportunity to re-examine can, Indonesian and Indian music in particu- The composer's Reich's composition Drumming (1971), a piece lar will serve as new structural models for West- that is often described as both "minimalism's ern musicians. Not as new models of sound. interest in West first masterpiece" and "overtly influenced by (That's the old exoticism trip.) Those of us African music, non-Western music."3 who love the sounds will hopefully just go and learn how to play these musics. ' which intensified As early as 1 968, in his now famous es- just prior to his say, "Music as a Gradual Process," Reich ex- trip to Accra in the n the summer of 1 970, Reich traveled pressed displeasure with new music's empha- to Accra, Ghana, to study Ewe music at the sis on improvisation and Indian music. In May summer of 1970, University of Ghana, Legon, with the master 1 969, in program notes for a concert at the then found a legiti- drummer Gideon Alorworye. After five weeks Whitney Museum of American Art, Reich stated of hard work, taking lessons and transcribing explicitly, "I am not interested in improvisation mized outlet in his music, Reich contracted malaria and returned or sounding exotic."8 A musical aesthetic own compositional to New York soon afterwards. In Reich's words, based on the intersection of Western and non- the musical experience was "overwhelming," Western music could be easily criticized by practice. In par- "like being in front of a tidal wave,"4 and after skeptics of musical fusion and lead to charges ticular, by positing a hiatus of creative activity during his stay in of contradicting his prior aesthetic stance. But the type of binary Accra, he began to compose again. The result the above-mentioned comments in May 1 970 - a year after his return - was Drumming. Reich demonstrate a shift in his distaste for musical opposition between and his performing ensemble premiered the hybrids. In anticipation of his formal study of sound and struc- piece on December 3, 1971 at the Museum of Ewe music - perhaps after having taken two Modern Art in New York, and received a stand- lessons with the Ewe master drummer, Alfred ture... ing ovation after a one and one-half-hour long Ladzepko in New York - Reich apparently be- performance. Tom Johnson, a composer and gan to articulate a solution to the problem of critic for the Village Voice, attempted to explain music-cultural fusion, which had apparently the audience's overwhelming enthusiasm for seemed either unethical or in bad taste just a the piece, citing various reasons including the year earlier.9 work's eschewal of dissonance, unusual timbral What could be the reasons for such an combinations, and sensual appeal. One of aesthetic shift? In his 1972 essay, "The Phase- Johnson's comments, however, speaks to a dif- Shifting Pulse Gate, Four Organs, 1968-1970: ferent aspect of the work's success: "...the An End to Electronics," he describes his in- pleasure of seeing African and European ele- creasing dissatisfaction with electronics as a ments so thoroughly fused - almost as if we compositional resource, which came about as really did live in one world."6 Johnson's ap- a result of an intense period of experimenta- preciation for the fusion of musical cultures is tion with a new device of his own invention. stated explicitly in the review, a perspective that After composing Four Organs (1970), Reich he would favor in later articles on new music. noted that: For example, in "Music for the Planet Earth," the experience of composing and then written on January 4, 1 973, about a year after rehearsing with my ensemble was so positive, the review of Drumming, Johnson states that after more than a year of preoccupation with "the single most important influence on con- electronics, that another piece for four organs, temporary music...[is] the infiltration of non- Phase Patterns, happened very spontaneously Western ideas.'"' a month later in February of 1970. In this Despite the enthusiasm Johnson showed piece the four of us were literally drumming for Drumming, the unqualified emphasis on on our keyboards in what is called a cultural fusion in the review might have alarmed 'paradiddle' pattern in Western rudimental Reich somewhat. The year before, just before drumming. This piece proved to be as posi- his trip to Ghana, Reich wrote in his mani- tive an experience as Four Organs and led, festo-like "Some Optimistic Predictions about together with other factors, to a trip to Africa to the Future of Music" of May 1 970: study drumming. • Non-Western music in general and Afri- Up to that point, electronics had played <GLENDORA REVIEWxAfrican Quarterly on the ArtsxVol3@No3&4> <135> a significant role inthe composer's output. The tematically putting into practice and reaping the Many comparisons "phasing" process, which served as the basis benefits of his new non-Western based for most of his pieces of the late 1960s, had its compositional approach that avoided the use between the various origins in two pieces for tape: Its Gonna Rain of electronics. In May of the same year, an en- rhythmic and me- (1965) and Come Out (1966), In these pieces, semble billed as Sfeve Reich and Musicians two tape loops of the same recorded fragment gave a substantial concert of acoustical works lodic techniques in are played simultaneously, and gradually go at the John Weber Gallery in New York, includ- drumming and those out~af-sync due to the slight difference in the ing Clapping Music [1972) and the premiere found in Ewe music lengths of the two loops. Reich's disavowal of performances of Six Pianos and Music for |Ma3- electronics was a slap in the face of the musi- let instruments, Women's Voices, and Organ. have been made by cal avant-garde that had valorized electronics In the summer of the same year, Reich would SchwarZ Potter cts the future of composition. This shift required undertake a study of BalineseGamelan at the that he find a new basis for musical composi- University of Washington, Seattle. Thefollow- am* Others. In tion that could match the "cultural capital" of ing year was pivotal for the composer's careen particular, these electronic technology.11 Various historical and Reich's group would record Drumming, Six Pi- biographical factors, including Reich's prior anos, and Music for Mallet Instruments, Wom- scholars attribute exposure to and appreciation of non-Western en's Voices and Organ for the prestigious Reich's use of 12/8 musics as an undergraduate at Cornell and Deutsche Grammophon label, which recorded afterwards, the increased instifutio realization of various "avant-garde" composers including meter, hocket-ing, 13 ethnomusicology as a professional discipline, KarlheinzStockhausen. poly- the black liberation movement's promotion of the politics of difference, the intensification of rhythmic structures, the anti-Vietnam War protests, greater support and constant pulse for environmentalist (and anti-technological} causes, and the Immigration Act of 1965, which to his exposure to reopened the country's doors to foreigners af- rumm/nq (i97i) beginswith ter forty-one years, served to make the particu- u J • J* A* non-Western (and lar historical moment one in which the ideal of a single beat on a bongo arum tuned to A#, genuine musical-cultural fusion might have repeated several times in unison by two, three, particularly tradi- been valued over electronics-based composi- orfourdrummers. Then,suddenly,anothernote A!__ • r- v _..-:- tion within Reich's community of New York com- tionai ewe) music. is heard, a B, slightly after the A#, and the new posers, musicians, and artists. pattern repeats a number of times. Then we Reich's shift to a non-Western based mu- find another note (also a B, just before the A#), sical aesthetic required that he modify his harsh and another (a G# offer all three notes) and so opinions about the use of non-Western musics on, until we hear an energetic 12/8 pattern that and promote the importance of such music as uses the pitches G#, A#, B, and C#. (See a new basis for composition. The composer's example 1 for this sequence, in mm. 1 -8.) In interest in West African music, which intensi- this way, the rhythmic pattern that serves as the fied just prior to his trip to Accra in the summer basis for the entire composition is built up from of 1 970, then found a legitimized outlet in his a single, basic pulse.
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