Rethinking Reich

5 Repetition, Speech, and Authority in Steve Reich’s “Jewish” Music Robert Fink BD: Will there ultimately be a town of Friendship? SR: I’m not a prophet; I’m only a poor composer. So I have no idea. BD: I hope you’re better than a poor composer! [Laughs] SR: Well, I mean, compared to a prophet.1 Exodus 4:9– 10 Good New Ideas Usually Turn Out to Be Old What happened to Steve Reich? This was the question circulating at a recent scholarly conference on musical minimalism, during a searching session de- voted to historical analysis of repetitive music and cultural politics.2 Surveying the long arc of Reich’s career, participants became aware of an uncomfortable truth: that repetition in Reich’s music, though it may have started out as an avant- garde gesture accompanying conventionally liberal attitudes, had, over the years, increasingly been put in the service of traditionalist, conservative politics, and even, in the aftermath of the 9/ 11 terror attacks, something disturb- ingly close to xenophobia. Reich’s optimistic 1970 prediction, that “the pulse and the concept of clear tonal center” would be the future of new music, has come true, but, it seems, with politically complex results. Sometime around the mil- lennium, minimalist repetition, once associated with antihegemonic thought 113 114 Repetition, Speech, and Identity and action, began to harmonize with geopolitical rhetorics of power, as both modernist and feminist critics have long warned us it could.3 How, then, might we trace a changing politics of repetition across Steve Reich’s musical career? First, we need a point of articulation, some pivot between the early, questioning Reich of the 1960s—by no means a hippie, but a restless prodigal son, at least, cum center- left secular Jewish intellectual— and the twenty- first- century musical patriarch who now appears to have found his answers, who increasingly sees even the disruptive innovations of his early career as a return to intellectual certainties from the past: In retrospect, I understand the process of gradually shifting phase relationships between two or more identical repeating patterns as an extension of the idea of infinite canon or round . that this new process bears a close family resem- blance to the thirteenth century musical idea of round seems to give it some depth. Good new ideas generally turn out to be old.4 It’s Gonna Rain, the work Reich is discussing, was written in 1965, but his repositioning of its repetitive tape loops as an “infinite canon” comes from his collection of writings on music, first published in 1974; it is thus roughly con- temporaneous with his return to Jewish orthodoxy, and his first encounters with Hebrew liturgical language and the rabbinical cantillation systems developed to render it audible.5 The first fruit of Reich’s subsequent study of accent markings (ta’amim) in Semitic cantillation was Tehillim (1981), also his first texted work since the speech- based tape works of 1965– 67. Taking advantage of the fact that the Psalms have no canonical tradition of Ashkenazi liturgical performance, Reich composed what by his own account are musically “traditional” settings of the Hebrew text,6 highlighting his ability to construct patterns of changing meter that mirror precisely its spoken accent patterns when sung. Tehillim was a breakthrough piece for Reich, who had been enduring a fallow compositional period after producing his summary masterwork of patterned repetition, Music for 18 Musicians, in 1976.7 With its achievement, he effec- tively abandoned the complex of repetitive rhythmic processes— phase shifting, beat- class pattern filling, systematic augmentation and diminution—that had dominated his work, singly and in combination, since their genesis in his first experiments with taped speech loops in 1965.8 Reich’s desire to set a biblical text rendered those repetition techniques irrelevant, pushing him toward a direct re- engagement with the “musical” aspects of emotionally heightened speech explored by his early tape works. Tehillim is, in this view, a conscious rewriting of the speech- song of It’s Gonna Rain. But where the earlier work used an over- load of looping and dubbing to fix the listener’s attention on the way “[black] Pentecostal preaching hovers between speaking and singing,”9 the new piece parcels out repeats according to the composer’s new view of his earlier speech- based work as essentially traditional and (in both senses of the word) canonic. Over a pulsating, nonmotivic accompaniment, each biblical verse is set as a Repetition, Speech, and Authority 115 single melodic phrase without internal repeats; repetitive textures occur only during literal four- part canons built up in the outer movements. Reich explained in an accompanying program note that he deliberately avoided his characteristic “repetition of short patterns” in order to be “as faithful to the Hebrew text as possible,” using music to make both accent pattern and meaning immediately comprehensible. In a strikingly awkward yet em- phatic turn of phrase, itself repetitively stuttering and yet strangely passive, he described how the decision to abandon repetitive process was all but forced on him: “Returning then to the question about repetition as a musical technique, my reason for limiting it to repetition of complete verses of the Psalm text is basically that, based on my musical intuition, the text demanded this kind of setting.” Eight years later, as he began serious work on his “documentary opera,” The Cave (1993), submission to the (voice in the) text was again experienced as an ineluctable command: “What I found was that once I had chosen the text, the text then forced me to do things musically I would not otherwise have done. This I found to be extremely stimulating.”10 Argument: Speech, Music, and Repetition in The Cave I am going to make overt a hermeneutic strategy that the alert reader, primed by the epigraphs to this chapter, might already have registered with some sur- prise: bracketing Reich’s return to Jewish orthodoxy with a renewed attention to text setting and the abandonment of instrumental repetition, I am casting the postminimalist composer in the role of musical prophet. Yielding, under duress, to an inner call to prophesy is, one might argue, the master trope for any self- identified Jewish creative artist; thus it’s not surprising to find that Reich’s original plan for what became Tehillim was to set an excerpt from the book of Jonah, the paradigmatic reluctant preacher of God’s word.11 In what follows, I want to lay out terms upon which one might consider the relationship between repetition, speech, and prophetic authority in the music of Steve Reich, a complex and contradictory set of relations encapsulated in the biblical figure of Moses, the stuttering Prophet, who was both the vessel for divine truth and un- able to master the rhythms of articulate speech. (He was, to quote a phrase that has been variously and ingeniously glossed for millennia, “slow of tongue.12”) The point here is not to become caught in the biblical content of Reich’s “Jewish” works, or to imply that Reich’s re- encounter with his own Judaism nec- essarily drove his worldly politics in a conservative direction. (It does appear that this happened, but making that case will not be my focus.) Rather, I want to consider the way the innate repetitiveness of musical discourse—a funda- mental constituent of “the musical” foregrounded by minimalism— both fosters and undermines the power of the spoken texts that Reich increasingly placed at the center of his work during this pivotal period.13 In Reich’s own telling, 116 Repetition, Speech, and Identity composing Tehillim meant acceding to a voice in his head— he called it his musical intuition— that insisted he make his music speak the truth, by subjecting it to the musical demands of speech as truth. But what is that “truth”? In the shifting interactions between composed music and sampled speech over the course of The Cave, what the text(s) “demand” is never clear, and a delicately negotiated politics of speech and its repetition must be reconstructed, some- times measure by measure. Almost a decade in conceptual development and production, The Cave will likely retain its position as the most ambitious single project in the linked careers of Reich and his longtime partner, video artist Beryl Korot. The work, whose eponymous subject, the Cave of the Patriarchs, is believed by both Jews and Muslims to be the burial place of Abraham, the first prophet of Yahweh, is strongly didactic on at least three levels. Juxtaposing texts from the Torah and Koran with contemporary interviews, The Cave’s libretto attempts to show that Axial Age historical and cultural roots underlie the current Arab- Israeli conflict; the staging of the opera deploys a wide range of language- bearing media— including videotaped speech and handwriting, live performance of sung text, and animated computer display of typed/printed texts—to both com- municate its argument and privilege speech over writing in a characteristically Western way; and, as a musical composition, The Cave presents a catalog of techniques by which repetition, in particular canonic imitation, might mediate between the musical potential of spoken discourse and the discursive potential of musical sound. The current discussion will bracket off the political controversy attendant on the first aspect of The Cave to focus on its second aspect: the battle, carefully staged by Reich and Korot, between the epistemological claims of speech, song, and writing. It is designed as a theoretical prolegomenon to a larger critical- analytical study of the third aspect, the evolving way in which The Cave’s musical repetitions interact with the melody and rhythm of the sampled speech on which the opera is built.

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