5

Repetition, Speech, and Authority in ’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 pol- itics, 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

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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 be- tween 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 ca- reer 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 (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, , 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 pat- tern 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 be- tween 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 mu- sical 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 mu- sical repetitions interact with the melody and rhythm of the sampled speech on which the opera is built. To understand this last aspect, and thereby develop a reading of Reich’s language- based operatic politics, one must first interrogate his long- standing and oft-expressed belief that “natural” speech is an expressively “true” marker of identity in ways that other linguistic forms are not. Reich’s privileging of talking over writing and singing goes all the way back to apologias for his earliest tape works; it places the composer within a logocentric tradition that encompasses not only the European philosophers he studied in college but also the prophetic Hebrew writings with which he began to engage seriously only in his midthirties. Let me orient the reader of the present chapter with a synopsis of what de- tailed textual analysis might eventually tell us about the larger relationship between speech and repetition in Reich’s “Jewish” period. In general, pulsed repetition of speech fragments, in the early tape pieces a generator by itself, automatically, of the listener’s perception that sampled speech has melody and

Repetition, Speech, and Authority 117 rhythm, is sidelined in works like The Cave by the composer’s own deliberate transcription of what he perceives to be its “true” musical content. Repetition, relieved of the responsibility to musicalize speech through gradual process, takes on new forms that have the composerly air of the past. (Good new ideas generally turn out to be old.) In the course of The Cave’s three acts, speech fragments from subject interviews are presented frankly, from the very beginning, as musical motives and are then made to repeat at irregular intervals through retriggering, accompanied and pervasively imitated by groups of string and wind instruments that also repeat canonically among themselves. In act 2, as Israeli voices give way to Palestinian, the episodes of musicalized speech begin to include live singers who, having functioned as a separate chorus cantillating episodes from Genesis, are now interwoven contrapuntally with the speakers. In act 3, devoted to American voices, the singers repeat the interviewees’ words, but vary their pitches and rhythms, creating a rich four-part counterpoint that, finally, merges back into the homophony of the opening as the opera returns to the biblical texts with which it began. This elaborately lapped repetition structure, in which words, phrases, melodies, rhythms, movements, and even acts seem obsessively to repeat each other, fairly cries out for interpretation as cultural practice. One might attempt to induce the power dynamics enacted in The Cave from close comparative reading of repetition structures across the opera’s three acts, paying atten- tion to the political distribution of different compositional techniques. Whose utterances are repeated— and by whom? Who is allowed to speak at length, and who is constantly interrupted? Do Reich’s composed-out repetitions under- mine the authority of his speakers? Or does musical repetition undermine his authority, signaling prophetic overload, an intermittent breakdown of signifi- cation in which, under the imperious demands of the text, Reich’s music itself begins to stutter? A full treatment of speech, authority, and repetition in Reich’s vocal music must eventually deal with all these questions, but in what follows I want to prepare the ground by posing a single, more general one: What does The Cave tell us (and show us) about the power of speech itself? What are the contours of the philosophical field on which its games of music, language, and repetition are played out?

In Plato’s Cave: Steve Reich’s Metaphysics of Presence

It is fair to say that Steve Reich’s retrospective view of his own career puts his rec- ognition of the musical possibilities of spoken language at the center.14 He has returned over and over to the notion of “speech melody,” a phrase by which, in the tradition of the Greco- German umbrella term melos, he refers to the linked constellations of pitch and rhythm that arise “naturally” from the distinctive

118 Repetition, Speech, and Identity way a given person talks. At the time of The Cave, Reich held and expressed expansive views on the epistemic power of musical speech: “In our Western languages, speech melody hovers over all our conversations, giving them their fine emotional meaning. . . . We are, with speech melody, in an area of human behavior where music, meaning, and feeling are completely fused.”15 For Reich, the distinctive cadences of the human voice, if reproduced in a work of art trans- parently enough, can give the listener access to subjectivity and individuality directly, without any sense of mediation. The person speaking is just . . . there: Using the voice of individual speakers is not like setting a text— it’s setting a human being. A human being is personified by his or her voice. If you record me, my cadences, the way I speak are just as much me as any photograph of me. When other people listen to that they feel a persona present.16 Reich first made this claim of presence in regard to his tape works (the preceding passage is from a program note for It’s Gonna Rain, probably written a few years after the work’s 1965 premiere). At about the same time, he played theatrically on the relationship between recorded speech melody and physical presence in a “live” electronic work. My Name Is (1967) was a site-specific phasing piece employing multiple tape loops, realized in front of an audi- ence on three lo-fidelity portable players. But rather than field recordings, the vocal raw material was sourced from audience members themselves, waylaid as they entered the concert, saying (they of course did not know why) “My name is— ” followed by a first name. As Reich later noted, “hearing your name that way tends to get to people,” especially since, having no idea that their voice would be at the center of a musical composition, most people identified themselves “in an offhand way.” But the effect of My Name Is goes beyond this ironic shock of self- recognition. Theoretically, it is an almost perfect representation of what Jacques Derrida, writing in that same year, called out in his Of Grammatology as the underlying fiction of linguistics, that human thought is based on an original “self- present voice” that transmits “the most immediate, natural, and direct signification” of meaning from subject to sub- ject.17 My Name Is confronted select members of its audience with the most direct possible artistic representation of Derrida’s “s’entendre parler” (hearing/ understanding- oneself- speak): the amplified sound, repeated over and over, and then elaborated in three-part phased counterpoint, of their own recorded voices, captured announcing and then pronouncing their own first names, sound- images that pointed, precisely, to themselves, the people there, listening. (There is no record of how 1967 audiences physically reacted to the piece as self- presence; did they crane their heads, trying to match the exuberant call and response of recorded voices to the actual, silent bodies around them?)18 Reich’s tape loops, constructed in absentia while the concert’s first half was in progress, functioned during the performance according to Derrida’s logic of the trace, the mechanical recording of the past onto the present, the absence

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“behind the scenes” that enables and yet destabilizes our subjective feelings of immediacy and self- presence.19 Reich characterized My Name Is as a caricaturist’s game, “sort of like doing a sketch of people at the door.” The idea that one could capture a person’s essence in a fleeting vocal trace stayed with him, spurring the nascent documentary aesthetic that would culminate in works like and The Cave. In September 1975, he contributed a short essay, “Videotape and a Composer,” to an anthology of writings on video art coedited by his new companion and future collaborator, Beryl Korot. He outlined two possible projects in which his signa- ture phasing process could be applied to video: an update of My Name Is, and a new, related piece to be called, simply, Portraits:

In this piece, three or more people are videotaped close up saying words or making sounds that give some direct intuitive insight into who they are. A ca- sual remark accompanied by a typical gesture or a habitual speech melody might contain the brief (one to three seconds or so) sound and image necessary for the portrait. Each brief videotape is then duplicated as a loop, as mentioned above, and played on three or more decks and monitors, as described for My Name Is.20

Marcelle Pierson notes the “Rousseauian echo” of passages like these, the way they tap into a notion of natural language woven deep into the discourse of Western metaphysics.21 She also finds it significant that this rediscovery of voice and gesture happens for Reich in the context of renewed interest in Jewish liturgical music. The primal linkage explored in Portraits, between a “habitual speech melody” and a “typical gesture,” is reminiscent of the poetic story Abraham Idelsohn tells in his 1929 Jewish Music about the unbroken de- velopment of the ta’amim, the signs of biblical cantillation in the Hebrew world; in a sweeping passage that Reich reproduces in his own article on the subject, Idelsohn conjectures that when the cantor’s gestures in space were transcribed as marks on a page, the practice of cantillation gave birth to the technology of musical notation.22 For Pierson, this alternative, mythic tradition provides an alibi for a return to notated song: “Reich finds [in Idelsohn’sJewish Music] an or- igin story to rival Rousseau’s. Cantillation moved from the voice to gesture and finally to the written page—a narrative of the advent of technē in the vocal act.”23 In this reading, song and (musical) writing are allies in a battle against the metaphysical truth claims of speech- as- presence. As Gary Tomlinson has argued, following the logic of Derrida’s supplement, “Singing and writing con- verge on speech from different sides. . . . By virtue of the characteristic surplus- over- speech that each carries, they resist the preeminence of speech within the logocentric scheme.”24 Of course, Derrida’s insight is theoretically true of almost any musical composition by a Western author;25 why should we tarry to mark yet another musical struggle with logocentrism? As will become clear through the following analysis, I findThe Cave striking for Reich’s unusual,

120 Repetition, Speech, and Identity self- abnegating authorial position. Thanks in part to his idiosyncratic reading of Rousseau- through- Idelsohn, he is the rare composer of an opera who seems to take the side of logos, of spoken language as immediately present, against the dual supplementarity of both writing and song— a choice all the more striking for being overtly thematized in the mise en scène of the work’s complex, multi- layered libretto. (Note that in making this claim I diverge, for my own purposes, from Pierson’s melos- centric reading of Reich’s work.) Reich and Korot jointly developed the book for The Cave, weaving its text together out of four distinct types of linguistic material: (1) five shortframing questions in the form, “Who is, for you, Abraham (Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, Isaac)?”; (2) sampled excerpts from the sampled answers to those questions, all in English, collected in West Jerusalem, Hebron, New York City, and Austin, Texas, over the period 1989– 91; (3) Hebrew and Arabic liturgical chants, presented in the original language; and (4) scriptural episodes from the book of Genesis involving the patriarch Abraham and his kin, presented in multiple European languages. Composer and video artist then quite literally “set” the four types of texts used in The Cave in front of their audience, using synchro- nized multichannel video on five screens both to present the written word in dynamic, visual forms and to demarcate a large multilevel stage set, upon which the musicians in the original production performed live (see Figure 5.1).26 Each of these modes of linguistic action— question, answer, liturgy, scripture— is structured by a different set of “primal” relations among the powers of speech, writing, and song. But in the theatrical space of The Cave, with its relentless doubling of seeing and hearing— “The idea,” reports Reich, “was that you would be able to see and hear people as they spoke on the vide- otape and simultaneously you would see and hear onstage musicians doubling them, actually playing their speech melodies as they spoke”27— everything, as it were, turns to speech. Writing is endowed with the immediacy and presence of logocentric fantasy, while singing, yoked firmly to the demands of its text, relinquishes (if the onstage mirroring is strict enough) its “residue” (Pierson) of nonlinguistic excess.

Language Layers 1 and 2: Questions and Answers

The five framing questions are the deepest, oldest layer of The Cave. As in the original theatrical game of presence, Reich’s My Name Is (1967), the first move, the querying of identity that elicits the speech material from which the piece will be made, is not itself allowed to become part of that material. In a fasci- nating choice that reverberates through The Cave, the first question— Who is Abraham?—appears in writing. Is this an anti-logocentric gesture? Well, I didn’t use the gerundive casually: the words are not (already) written and then shown; rather, it is precisely the process of writing that appears, by hand, filmed in extreme

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Figure 5.1 Original stage set of The Cave (1993), showing the use of video screens during a “talking head” section. close- up, so that the highly amplified sound of ballpoint pen on paper fills the ambient space of the theater. Platonism famously held that writing was more like painting than speech, for, as Socrates notes in the Phaedrus, “The creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. It is the same with written words.”28 As Derrida notes in glossing this passage, for the Platonist, writing is worse than figurative art because “it inscribes in the space of silence and in the silence of space the living time of voice.”29 But not this writing— these words appear in real time on the screen; they make a sound: they speak. This brief moment of writing- as- sounding is not the first thing we hear in Reich and Korot’s documentary opera. There has already been a long scrip- tural prelude, about which more anon. Later, what Reich designates in his score as the “sound of scratchy pens writing” will fill an entire movement, “Video Handwriting,” accompanying the sight on three video screens of three hands moving across the page in three different European languages, writing out Genesis 16:2–4, in which Hagar conceives the firstborn son of Abraham. (Each hand writes at its own speed, and thus the three pens trace out an

122 Repetition, Speech, and Identity abrasive rhythmic canon, analogous to the three- part canonic processes in My Name Is.) But it is this initial flash of speech-writing, Who is Abraham?, that rings up the opera’s curtain, setting the action in motion and motivating a long entrance speech/ aria. Dr. Ephraim Isaac, director of the Institute for Semitic Studies at Princeton, and a distinguished public intellectual of Ethiopian-Yemenite Jewish descent, answers the opening question about Abraham at length, telling how he learned from his father to recite the unbroken lineage, name by Hebrew name, from Adam, the first man, down to himself. In effect, he improvises an iterative, patrilineal expansion of My Name Is to encompass, from a Jewish perspective, all of human history:

Who is Abraham? Abraham, for me, is my ancestor— my very own personal ancestor. I was brought up to think like that, and I still, I guess, think like that. It stuck in my mind. My father, when I was a young person, well, ac- tually a child, used to count the names of our ancestors starting with Adam going all the way down to the Twelve Tribes. And I remember how we used to learn: Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kainan, Mahalalel, Yered, Enoch, Metushelah, Lemech, Noach, and then we would go on down, Noach, Shem, Arpachshad, Shelah, Peleg, Reu, Serug, Nahor, Terah, Abraham, and then we used to say, Abraham, Yitzhak, Ya’acov, and then we used to say the Twelve Tribes, our ancestors’ names, just memorize all of them, Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Issachar, Zebulun, Dan, Naftali, Gad, Asher, Josef, Benyamin, and then go all the way down and come down to my great- great- great- grandfather whose name was Shimon, and then Shalom and then Shalam and Harun and Mesha, and Yitzhak and myself. So for me there is a chain of ancestral relationship to Abraham.

It is hard to imagine a more perfectly logocentric text. It not only is speech, it is about speech, used in precisely the way that privileges speech in Platonic metaphysics, as a method of face- to- face, mnemonic instruction, in which pa- triarchal truth, the “intelligent word,” is “graven in the soul of the learner.”30 As Derrida notes, “It is precisely logos that enables us to perceive and investigate something like paternity,”31 and, speaking directly to the camera, The Cave’s first interviewee, the only one allowed to go on uninterrupted at such length, testifies to the metaphysical effect of the (spoken) word of his father: “I was brought up to think like that, and I still, I guess, think like that. It stuck in my mind.” Socrates himself could not have asked for more.32 Isaac’s speech is an extreme example of Reich and Korot’s general procedure in the second layer of the work, which preserves, like a fossil, Reich’s unrealized 1975 idea for Portraits. During these documentary sections, although the sound of speech is pervasively repeated and imitated in sound, the visual “repetition” of sound by the written word is conspicuously absent; captions, translations, or inscriptions do not clutter the multichannel mise en scène that Korot generates

Repetition, Speech, and Authority 123 by freezing and enlarging small details from the short video clips that, together, made up what she called the “talking head channel” of the score.33 The visuals are subservient, helping sketch “a kind of musical portrait”34 of the Israeli, Arab, and American interviewees while they speak. As Reich had predicted in 1975, during these sections, “the [video] image is . . . simply the ‘sync image’ of the soundtrack,”35 and the effect is to highlight voice as presence, the simultaneous experience of speaking as both melody and body language.

Language Layers 3 and 4: Chant and Scripture

It is worth noting at this point that The Cave presents Ephraim Isaac’s long ex- position of his paternal ancestry without repetition of any kind. The speech itself is repetitious in the way that a mnemonic often is, with a loose refrain structure (“and then we used to say . . .”) that helps articulate the long sequence of memorized names. But Reich does not use the power of digital sampling to break it up and rearticulate it musically: he does not impose additional repeti- tion.36 Nor does he accompany the speech with repetitive motives derived from its melodic contours. Both those techniques are central to The Cave, of course, and I will discuss their implications later. But let us remain with Dr. Isaac for a moment. During the remainder of act 1, his voice is sampled, transcribed into musical notation, and echoed by instruments, like all the other talking heads we simultaneously see and hear. But Reich gives him the last word, closing the act with his chanting of the Torah portion that tells of the death of Abraham and his burial in the Cave of Machpelah (Genesis 25:7– 10). Isaac’s cantillation of this text follows the distinctive Yemenite tradition, per- haps the oldest still extant, old enough that it preserves ta’amim for the Psalms, the ones whose loss in the Ashkenazi tradition opened up a space for Reich to compose his own setting. In this third layer of The Cave, most directly related to his late 1970s study of Hebrew cantillation, Reich the composer steps aside in favor of Mizrahi (“Eastern,” that is, from the Near East, not Spanish or German) chant, an aboriginal practice shared by Jews and Arabs that, even more than the tropes he learned in New York, can be imagined to preserve the “primal, au- thentic speech- force of melody.”37 Reich clearly understood that, as a twentieth- century American, he had no more authority to impersonate this lost unity than he did more recognizably non-Western musical traditions: “Just as I had found it inappropriate to imitate the sound of African or Balinese music, I found it similarly inappropriate to imitate the sound of Hebrew cantillation.”38 Thus,The Cave presents the liturgical song of the Other without editorial in- terference, as if it were ethnographic documentation of Rousseau’s “primitive” speech- melodies— but with a (dia)critical difference. Unlike the score’s actual speech fragments, transcribed into musical notation by the composer prior to the performance and read only by the live musicians doubling and imitating

124 Repetition, Speech, and Identity them, passages of liturgical chant from the Torah and Koran are not transcribed, but visually “doubled” for the audience by printing out the sacred texts, in real time, onstage. In what I would identify as the opera’s signature stage effect, neatly typeset and translated lines of scripture appear rhythmically, verse by verse, on multiple video screens next to the cantor’s image as he sings. The effect was hinted at during Isaac’s long patrilinear speech, but there it was only the proper names in his recitation that were flashed, in tempo, on the screen as he spoke them. Reich and Korot most consistently deploy this “simultaneous transla- tion” effect for the topmost layer of the text, the scriptural episodes relating to Abraham, his wives, and their descendants, primal family scenes into which the written questions and the spoken commentaries burrow. Since Reich set these biblical texts (in English)39 for his ensemble, using the metrically respon- sive postminimal style developed for Tehillim, Korot devised an equally metrical technique for setting them out onstage, suturing precise bursts of computer- generated text to every irregular phrase and downbeat. Mise en scène and mise en musique are perfectly matched; as promised, everything we hear, we can in- stantaneously read as well. One hesitates to interpret this pas de deux of composer and videographer according to Derrida’s logic of the supplement, where each, by focusing so in- tensely on his or her métier, undermines rather than stabilizes their collective project.40 In fact, both Reich and Korot are intensely dedicated structuralists whose work jointly and equally resists Derrida’s critique of the sign, and it is Korot who takes control of the stage at the opera’s opening in breathtaking fashion, providing a theatrical primer on how to mobilize sound and writing in the service of compositional and textual logos.

Orthography, Rhythm, and the “Voice” in the Text (The Cave, Act 1, Scene 1, “Opening Typing Music”)

Let us consider the first of these scriptural episodes in more detail.The Cave begins with an instrumental movement, in which the English text of Genesis 16:1– 12 is “read,” not by vocalists, but by the percussionists of the Steve Reich Ensemble, who translate its irregular speech rhythms directly into sound (Ex. 5.1). A detailed look at the stage picture created in this opening scene (Figure 5.2, taken from a 2011 production in Strasbourg), shows how even simplified versions of the original staging preserve Korot’s design, which counterpoises to these rhythms the presence of writing itself as a “character,” playing its part in the dramatic argument as both opaque visual sign and carrier of logos. Since no one is actually speaking the parenthetical text in Reich’s score, there is no talking head channel; all five video screens, which form a rough three- over- two arch, are filled with writing. The two lower and outer screens present static, matching images of the Torah, so tightly cropped that the words bleed

Example 5.1 Reich, The Cave, act 1, scene 1, mm. 10– 30.

Figure 5.2 Staging of a scriptural episode (Genesis 16:1– 12) from The Cave, showing multiple traces and doublings of writing (Strasbourg, 2011).

126 Repetition, Speech, and Identity off their edges. For a typical audience, these texts, handwritten in special sa- cred calligraphy, will not be legible; even those fluent in modern Hebrew cannot “sight- read” them, since it has never been permitted to write the necessary di- acritical marks for speech (vowels, punctuation, and cantillation signs) directly onto the scrolls. The relation (or, rather, nonrelation) between this unreadable, heavily cropped Masoretic inscription and the nonvocal “reading” of the speech rhythms arising from its simultaneous translation into (unheard) English is at the heart of my interpretation of the opera. This relation produces a short cir- cuit of meaning that Derrida associates with the trace, the written mark in its subversive, “pictorial” aspect: “all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice.”41 Thus alienated, these traces of (hand)written Hebrew are very nearly reduced to silent, symmetrical pieces of set decoration. What saves them, paradoxically, is Korot’s careful attention to orthography, the distributive “art” of placing words on the page. Hebrew is read from right to left; but, if one looks closely, the initial indentation implies that each line of Genesis 16 begins on the left screen and continues, roughly, sometimes overlapping, onto the screen at right. The two incomprehensible pictures we see are, in fact, two cropped instances of a single text—but to put the pieces back together, one must go up (aliyah) and over, and this clockwise path runs right through a very different style of writing onstage.42 The upper three screens of the stage arch present modern translations of the biblical text in white serifed letters against a black background: English appears at the center, flanked by German and French. At one level, this polyglot display epitomizes what deconstruction finds to be the tautological nature of writing as pure repetition of itself. All the texts “say” the same thing, that is to say, they repeat each other’s signs, but, as when Hebrew script is presented without vowels or punctuation, we don’t hear the voice there. Or, rather, we do hear it, but, to coin a perceptual oxymoron, we hear pri- marily with the eye, and only indirectly with the ear. Reich’s printed score for The Cave (see Ex. 5.1) discloses that each word of the English text is pinned to a percussive accent within a grid of changing instrumental accent patterns that correspond to its spoken accentuation. Although the percussion group includes drums, clapping, and pieces of wood (a syllabus of Reich’s favorite instruments across the 1970s), it is built around the three lines of “Typing Music” that give the opening movement its name. One typist is designated for each modern lan- guage used onstage, and each executes paradiddles on an actual computer key- board whose heavily amplified key clicks are mixed into the sound stage as part of the percussion battery. As the English-language text appears, word by word, on the top- center screen, in time with the key clicks of the first typist, we wit- ness a disorienting remapping of the logos. The printed scripture (that is, a me- chanically reproduced simulacrum of writing) is presented to us perceptually

Repetition, Speech, and Authority 127 as if it were speech (an action that happens rhythmically in real time, that has a distinctive sound). But no audible voice activates this text; rather, it is the text itself that appears to speak, whose visual appearance is, itself, (a kind of) speaking. It is a slippery, simulated sort of speech. On the one hand, the assemblage on- screen of perfect typography in time to the rhythmic clicking of keys was ubiquitous enough an experience by 1993 to have been naturalized among The Cave’s computer- literate audiences as simply “the way thoughts appear to the mind,” just another way of s’entendre parler, with all the false immediacy and presence that phrase implies. As one might expect, this hearing/ seeing- oneself- type depends on the same metaphysics of linguistic presence at the root of My Name Is, now updated from the era of the magnetic tape recorder to that of the silicon- based word processor. On the other hand, the connection here— so crucial to logocentrism— between what one hears and what one understands turns arbitrary and met- onymic. The “live” typing is mere mime, designed to create the illusion that the words appearing on-screen are the result of some present human action, not just a mechanically unspooling trace left by Korot’s already enacted “ac- tion painting” with video scripture in the studio. (Like silent film accompanists or Foley artists, the typist- percussionists of The Cave use their musical skills to “mickey mouse” the phantom sounds of absent, prerecorded action.)43 The amplified key clicks do not in any sense transmit the meaning of the appearing words; sounds and images merely accompany each other with uncanny pre- cision in time. Synchronicity is not signification, as becomes clear when texts begin to appear on the top- left and top- right video screens. Korot coordinates the French and German versions of the biblical text with quick interjections from Reich’s second and third computer typists. These texts, though of course they generate completely different rhythmic patterns when spoken, are both quickly “typed out” by identical canonic bursts of repeated eighth notes (see Ex. 5.1, mm. 13–14, 21– 22, and 27–28). The musical gestures are so cursory that Korot has to cheat, making longer, nongrammatical chunks of the texts appear on each beat. One might assume that these not quite simultaneous translations of the Bible simply meant less to the collaborators.44 But though the link between audible sound and visible text frays at the top corners of the stage, it is not allowed to snap. Close listening to the 1993 studio recording reveals that Reich deployed his stereo illusion to shore up Korot’s illusion of writing- as- speech, panning the second and third typing parts hard right and left to match the spatial position of the German and French texts as they (would have) appeared.45 Even in the absence of staging, his flat little canons evoke the idea of speech rhythm without following it; if one knows the staging, the illusion of envoicing is sustained, just barely, by the overlay of aural onto visual space.

128 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

Of Musical Grammatology (in the Age of Digital Repetition)

It may seem perverse to approach Steve Reich’s attitude toward speech, music, and authority in opera by closely reading a passage in which no actual voices partake. But given the familiarity most listeners and critics have with Reich’s defense of speech melody from the excesses of operatic song— the way his documentary aesthetic disciplines all “inappropriate” musical responses to a politically charged situation by foregrounding the melodies and rhythms of recorded speech about it— what Tomlinson identifies as the other, equally im- portant front of a three- way battle, the grammatological clash between speech and writing, deserves its full report as well. From this perspective, the striking vocal innovation of Reich’s Jewish period, the choice to write speech melodies directly into his scores, might seem to put the composer on the wrong side of the logos. But, as Tomlinson notes, the very music notation that Reich em- ployed for the task “work[s] in intimate complicity with the logocentrism that has determined our orderings of speech, song, and writing.”46 Musical writing began as a way of doing for singing what the written word did for speech; that is, allow for the possibility of its accurate reproduction in the absence of the speaker/ singer. Once the voices do come in, this primal “transitive” function of musical writing quite audibly drives compositional developments in The Cave. Consider Example 5.2, from act 1, scene 7, a characteristic passage in which Reich begins with direct instrumental doubling of a speaking voice, thus suturing his written trace to immanent sonic presence. The composer then does what any composer would “naturally” do: he harnesses the fungi- bility of musical notation, its adaptability to reproduction by any musical in- strument, to transmit the speech’s musical essence to a waiting group of string players, who imitate and then canonically extend its characteristic rhythmic and melodic gestures. A clearer musical allegory for logocentrism can hardly be imagined; the in- strumental ensemble internalizes and then reproduces the melos of a patriarch’s speech, participating in an orchestrated version of the mnemonic scene of in- struction so privileged by Platonic thought.47 (The speaker here is biochemist and secular rabbi Yeshayahu Leibowitz, one of the most revered Israeli public intellectuals of the twentieth century.) But the entire thrust of Derrida’s grammatology is that subordinating any kind of writing to speech-as- truth in this way imposes an arbitrary limit on writing’s own power to engender the free play of signifiers. Notation, whether linguistic or musical, need not al- ways be so . . . literal. (“Literally” is the adverb Reich uses to describe how musical instruments should imitate speech in The Cave.)48 Marks on a page— ancient inscriptions, let us say— laid down without vowels or punctuation, then photographed and projected on a screen, might point not to the original, metaphysical presence of chanted speech but to other texts, written in other

Repetition, Speech, and Authority 129

Example 5.2 Reich, The Cave, act 1, scene 7, mm. 1– 16.

languages, on other screens: texts that are not themselves spoken, but rhythmi- cally drummed into existence. Any such grammatological reading of the opening scene of The Cave must contend not only with the relentless logocentrism of Reich’s compositional tech- nique but with the writing- as- a- form- of- speech subtext of Reich and Korot’s mise en scène. As I’ve sketched out earlier, writing and typing hands period- ically supplant the opera’s talking heads; as musical instruments imitate the

130 Repetition, Speech, and Identity voice, scratchy pens and clicking keyboards score their own manual ballet of alphabetic writing. (Derrida: “The history of writing is erected on the base of the history of the grammé as an adventure of relationships between the face and the h an d .” ) 49 This focus on the lookand sound of writing as real-time action turns it into a simulacrum of speech, a visual trace that strives for the illusion of aural presence. Everything, on stage and in the orchestra, is designed to bring us back to the primacy of the word—and let us acknowledge, now that we are almost at the end of this long theoretical journey— not just any old word, but the Word of the Almighty G*d himself. I reproduce in my text that distinctive orthographical stutter from orthodox Judaism not because I share its anxiety at taking the name of the ultimate patri- arch in vain but to put the vocal logic of the supplement on display. The harder you try to stabilize this speechified writing, the more grammatology takes over. Yes, disembodied writing appears to “speak” itself, but it simultaneously displaces the very human presence that underpins metaphysical claims for speech. In the resulting absence, a Babel of polyglot languages crowds the operatic stage, re- flecting not their collective identity as speech but their individual (and endless) semiotic difference (différance) from it. Even Reich’s own logocentric power as a composer, the ability to decipher with a musical ear the essence of the human as transmitted through the cadence of spoken language, cannot be relied upon. More than one recent critic has called Reich’s transcription skills into question; but even if we assume he usually “gets it right,” assume that musical caricatures (his term) of vocal utterance can capture something essential about the process of human thought, Reich manifestly cannot resist the temptation to add some- thing (repetitive) to the word(s) as given to him.50 Viz. Professor Liebowitz— the speaker who replied to the question “Who is Sarah?” with the identifying description “Abraham’s first wife”— did not, we can assume, involuntarily repeat the last two words of that phrase when interviewed, highlighting a characteristic ascending major sixth in his speech for the com- poser and his orchestra to exploit. It was the composer who decided to repeat those words, a choice that created the echo, and thus the motive. I don’t mean to suggest that the rising sixth was not there, that Reich invented it; I do suggest that it is impossible to separate something “real” in the source material from the artifice of its compositional transcription and repetition. In order to capture the cadence of what is spoken to him, the musical prophet must fix it, and then repeat it. In that repetition, like Moses, he will be heard, by the unsympathetic, to stutter. Even sympathetic critics tend to find Reich’s score forThe Cave disjointed. They sense his fundamental ambivalence about the respective powers of speech, writing, and song:

Reich seems, on the one hand, to follow the speakers almost slavishly with his music; but, on the other, thanks to the montage of words and phrases, the

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speakers are forced to submit to his musical will. This is as it should be; that’s why he is the composer. But it seems that Reich does not actually want [to be] that, and the result is a sort of compromise, in which neither speaker nor com- poser fully come into their own.51 Reich’s music thus displays a kind of speech impediment, its conflicted de- sire to imitate the fluency of spoken language leading only to “stunted, repeat- edly interrupted melodies”52 whose cumulative effect is “singularly inexpressive, cute (in a laborious way) rather than revealing.”53 More than one commentator diagnosed a consequent failure of the logocentric project, noting how the “ar- tificiality” of Reich’s repetition technique “disconnects sound from meaning.”54 Somewhat ungratefully, given how carefully Reich subordinated himself to the demands of the logos, some of these same critics preferred The Cave’s Rousseauian moments of “primitive” liturgical music: In itself the music’s emotional coloring is limited . . . the feeling evaporates as soon as the spoken phrase translates into pure music. Here and there you are moved, but by a thought or a gesture or a facial expression. The most directly affecting music is a couple of minutes of recorded Muslim recitation.55 Such aboriginal Semitic song, argued one influential New York critic who shared Reich’s strong connection to the Jewish faith, is what the composer should have been imitating: “The texts inspire a further longing, for a musical setting that suits their own character, one that is as mysterious, vital and reso- nant as the ancient tropes chanted by Mr. Isaac.”56 And with the reappearance of those “ancient tropes,” we have come full circle. Recall that Reich’s first setting of a Hebrew text was from the book of Psalms, which he chose precisely because there was no living tradition of sacred tropes “to either imitate or ignore.”57 Tehillim begins with the opening stanza of Psalm 19, which twists and turns in on itself in logocentric ecstasy: Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night revealeth knowledge; There is no speech, there are no words, neither is their voice heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. (19:2– 4)

Reich later glossed this passage according to what Derrida would have identified as an “onto- theology” of the word,58 which makes Abraham the speaker, at the birth of monotheism: “Abraham realizes he is the recipient of a wordless communication, he has an insight into things that is basically non- verbal, but which makes him aware that there is a divine intelligence behind all of nature.”59 Reich was a good student of the Torah, and would doubtless have known that the Hebrew noun used in Psalm 19 verse 4 to label this wordless communication, though it is often translated into English as “sound,” is actually

132 Repetition, Speech, and Identity from a root, qav, that can refer to a cord, a measuring line— or the string of a mu- sical instrument.60 In works like The Cave, Reich re- enacts the prophetic trans- mission of pure thought: through his compositional craft, speech is transformed into wordless communication, which then goes out, over the strings of musical instruments, to the whole world. I can now return to my opening, somewhat offhand, question with a much deeper sense of what a satisfactory answer might entail. What happened to Steve Reich? Well, he became a prophet of the (musicalized) word: a composer devoted like no other before him to making composition a vehicle for logocentric the- ology. And yet, the logic of the supplement has undermined his authority: sub- ordinating his music to the demands of logos, he only intensifies the desire of modern listeners for the mystery and vitality of unchained melos. In the beginning was the Word. But when a composer limits himself to taking dictation from it, one has to ask why, and to what end? In Reich’s case, the goal appears to be the remapping of musical creativity as a quasi-scriptural truth, a species of acoustic fundamen- talism that Reich shares with some of the most influential minimalist composers of his generation.61 Acknowledging this uncomfortable fact is the first step on the road to a more balanced critical assessment of his unparalleled composi- tional achievements.

Notes

1. Steve Reich [SR] interview with radio host Bruce Duffie [BD], November 1995 (www.bruceduffie.com/ reich.html). The “town of Friendship” is the West Bank city of Hebron, site of the Cave of the Patriarchs at the center of Reich’s 1993 opera, The Cave; Reich had previously noted that the Arabic name of the city, El Halil, refers to Abraham and means “the friend.” 2. This session, held at the Fourth International Conference on Music and Minimalism at Long Beach, CA, October 3– 6, 2013, was titled “Politics and Memory,” and featured papers by John Pymm, Celia Casey, Ryan Hepburn, and Andrea Moore. This chapter owes its genesis in part to their insights, and to those of the conference participants, especially Ryan Ebright and Sasha Metcalf, for which I am grateful. Any flaws in argumentation or evidence are, of course, my own. 3. On minimalism’s “rhetoric of power,” see Chave 1990. The high- modernist rejection of minimalist repetition as akin to the structure of reactionary discourses like fascism and advertising is diagnosed in Fink 2005b, especially 62– 67. It is be- yond the scope of this chapter to give a full account of how antihegemonic Steve Reich’s early essays in repetitive music actually were; crucial recuperative work on voice, race, and politics has already appeared in Scherzinger 2005, Gopinath 2009 and 2011, and, most recently, in challenging counterpoint with whiteness studies and psychoanalytic theory (see Biareishyk 2012). At the 2013 session, Pymm

Repetition, Speech, and Authority 133 discussed the political context of the early tape works, while Andrea Moore’s talk, “Memorial Minimalism: 9-11 and the Narration of Nation,” most directly addressed Reich’s post- 9/ 11 politics, juxtaposing his WTC 9/ 11 (2011) with contemporaneous interviews that show the composer deeply engaged with the apocalyptic and par- tisan logic of “the global war on terror.” 4. Reich 2002b, 20. 5. The definitive collection of Steve Reich’s writings and sustained commen- tary on his own work can be found in Reich 2002b, edited and with an introduc- tion by Paul Hillier. All quotes from Reich will be sourced there by page number, with editorial clarification as to the original dates of publication when necessary. A brief account of Reich’s return to the Jewish faith can be found here, in his 1982 article “Hebrew Cantillation as an Influence on Composition” (107). Although the present study is quite deeply concerned with the consequences of Reich’s en- counter with the patriarchal and prophetic speech of the Hebrew Bible, only a short gloss on his own reconversion can be provided. The original Lincoln Square Synagogue, at Sixty- Ninth Street and Amsterdam, where Reich took adult edu- cation classes, was a pivotal site in the Orthodox religious revival of the 1970s under its charismatic rabbi, Dr. Schlomo Riskin. In 1963, the twenty-three- year old Riskin took over a failing conservative congregation and created, as one re- cent account puts it, “American Judaism’s model synagogue” (Landowne 2013), pioneering a modern form of Orthodox Judaism that combined strict religious observance and staunch support of Israel with political activism, social transfor- mation, feminism, and outreach to assimilated secular Jews. Riskin emigrated to Israel in 1983 and took up the position of chief rabbi in the West Bank settlement of Ephrata, from whence he has built a major international reputation as a mod- erate nationalist religious leader and innovative pedagogue. Reich’s own religious practice is Orthodox, with some concessions to assimilated American taste: the baseball cap he invariably wears in public is appropriately casual, but a clear sign, for those who know, that he is observant enough always to cover his head in public. 6. Reich 2002b, 101. 7. Potter 2000, 246. 8. A contemporaneous, but still definitive overview of these developments can be found in Schwarz 1980– 81; for more analytical detail on Reich’s techniques of beat- class patterning and augmentation/ diminution, see Roeder 2003 and Atkinson 2011, respectively. 9. Reich 2002b, 21. 10. Reich 2002b, 104, 158 (emphases in original). 11. Ibid., 114. 12. The original Hebrew of Exodus 4:11, “k’bad-peh uk’bad lashon,” is most conservatively translated as “heavy of mouth and tongue.” There is little consensus among biblical scholars whether this phrase refers to a speech impediment, like a stutter; a physical deformity, like a cleft palate; or simply lack of native fluency in -ei ther Hebrew or Egyptian. Critical discussion of this passage in Graybill 2012, 16–22,

134 Repetition, Speech, and Identity lays out the textual evidence as an introduction to more general questions of Hebrew prophecy and the “travails” of the suffering male body. 13. The tense relationship between linguistic meaning and technologized repe- tition in the early tape works—does Reich’s setting intensify or destroy the individu- ality of the black men whose voices are used in It’s Gonna Rain and ?— has been a key point of critical dispute. M. Morris (2004), Scherzinger (2005), and Gopinath (2009) all begin from this point, as will I later in my argument. 14. Focusing on the pivotal nature of The Cave within Reich’s composerly ev- olution, and foregrounding its problematics of text setting and the human voice, I am entering a lively critical conversation already in progress. Ryan Ebright’s (2014) clarifying archival research into the genesis and evolution of the “Cave” project shows that Reich was considering a large- scale documentary music- theater work— one that would include images of the Holocaust as it re- engaged with human voices and “the kind of work I was doing with tape in the 1960s” (104)—as early as the spring of 1980, while he worked to satisfy the textual demands of Tehillim. There is also evidence that the documentary opera based on the modern implications of Abrahamic monotheism was taking shape at precisely the same time (1986– 88) as Reich’s actual return to recorded speech in Different Trains. Ebright demonstrates how The Cave, as the nexus for a set of preoccupations with history, documentary witness, and the human voice, “is central to Reich’s compositions of the 1980s and 1990s”; some of the same ground is covered in Pymm 2013, with particular attention to sketch materials that show Reich the composer plotting “narrative trails” through assemblages of recorded speech. Pymm, Scherzinger (2005, 215–18), and Gopinath (2009, 130– 34) have all analyzed in detail musical characteristics of the recorded voices in Reich’s early work, tracing the phenomenology of linguistic tonality and meter when subjected to repetitive process. Marcelle Pierson’s (2014, 2016) decon- struction of Steve Reich’s oft- quoted views on nature, authenticity, and the singing voice also covers similar ground. I will be glossing some of the same texts, and al- though Pierson considers The Cave only in passing, my account will, I trust, supple- ment her broader reading of the way vocal timbre and its “residues” of meaning and affect function in his work. 15. Reich 2002b, 181. 16. Ibid., 21. 17. Derrida 1997, 30. 18. This description and interpretation ofMy Name Is was gathered from the composer by editor Paul Hillier in 1999 (see Reich 2002b, 29–30). Gopinath (2009, 135) has noted in the context of 1966’s Come Out the simultaneous high sixties arising of process music and Derridean deconstruction. Reich had no contemporary knowl- edge of Derrida’s work, as far as we know. But it is interesting to note that as a phi- losophy student at Cornell in the 1950s, he would have shared seminar rooms with a promising graduate student named Keith Donnellan, who later became a major philosopher of language, and whose work, building on Bertrand Russell and J. T. Austin, has focused on the linguistic pragmatics of identifying descriptions and self- reference; that is, of statements like, “My name is— X.” See Donellan 1970, 335– 58.

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19. “Derrida’s [trace] is the mark of the absence of a presence, an always already absent present, of the lack at the origin that is the condition of thought and experi- ence.” Spivak in Derrida 1997, xvii. 20. Reich 2002b, 84. 21. Pierson 2016, 33. 22. Reich 2002b, 108– 9. Reich quotes Idelsohn (1929) 1992, 67– 68. This “origin story,” as Pierson correctly labels it, is highly suspect as music history. Idelsohn’s argument is based largely on the correspondences between one early sixteenth- century European source and his own twentieth- century transcriptions, and assumes, as does Reich himself, that the musical traditions of Middle Eastern Jewish communities remained unchanged for centuries while, for instance, the theory and structure of the Arab music around them shifted over the centuries. See Shiloah 1992, 103– 9, where Idelsohn’s claims are respectfully but skeptically evaluated. 23. Pierson 2016, 39. 24. Tomlinson 1995, 348. 25. Tolbert 2002. 26. The following discussion is based on the published score of The Cave, avail- able from Boosey & Hawkes; the 1993 Nonesuch recording by the Steve Reich Ensemble; performances at the Barbican in London during Phases: The Music of Steve Reich, October 2006; and filmed excerpts from the recent performance at the Musica Festival, Strasbourg, 2011. In fact, none of these sources entirely agree: the studio recording leaves out many sections of the score, especially in places where the loss of the video channels would vitiate the effect; also, Reich and Korot have eliminated and then restored several numbers from the staged opera over the years, and replaced the original stage set with a less expensive version for subsequent revivals. A complete variorum is beyond the scope of this chapter, but where neces- sary, I will identify a specific source when making observations on the work. 27. Reich 2002b, 172. 28. Plato 1892, 275d. 29. Derrida 1981, 138. 30. Plato 1892, 276a. 31. Derrida 1981, 80. 32. Interview (1989) with Ephraim Isaac, The Cave, act 1, scene 1. In Isaac, a pioneering intellectual and decorated peace activist who not only is director of the Institute of Semitic Studies at Princeton but also was the first professor of Afro- American Studies at Harvard, Reich has sought out not only a direct coeval (b. 1936) but a diplomatic voice of unimpeachable political integrity; if one were to imagine a contemporary carrier of the Socratic logos, it might well be the widely celebrated coauthor (along with Harold Brackman, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center) of From Abraham to Obama: A History of Jews, Africans, and African Americans (2015). 33. Korot in Reich 2002b, 172. Video footage from the Strasbourg performance of The Cave does disclose French supertitles above the stage area during the talking head sections of the score. But the conventions of operatic supertitles allow us to

136 Repetition, Speech, and Identity bracket these words off as “outside of the performance,” at least provisionally. (The echo of Derrida’s hors- du- texte is deliberate, and signals the provisional nature of this interpretive move.) 34. Korot in Reich 2002b, 174. 35. Reich 2002b, 83. 36. In fact, he could not have fitted this long speech into the sampling keyboard he was using in the late 1980s; even at a sub-CD quality sample rate of 36 kHz, the Casio FZ- 1 could hold only fifteen seconds of audio (see Ebright 2014, 110n18). 37. Tomlinson 1995, 350. 38. Reich 2002b, 114. The observation that “the word ‘inappropriate’ often sig- nals [Reich’s] moral anxieties” comes from Sumanth Gopinath (personal communi- cation with the author, 2015). 39. The English text does not correspond exactly to any widely circulated trans- lation. It most closely follows a 1917 translation “from the Masoretic text” by the Jewish Publication Society (JPS Tanakh, 1917), with updated pronouns and some streamlined phrasing. This version is close in diction and cadence to the familiar King James Version. I have not been able to identify the French and German translations used. 40. Reich and Korot have always maintained that their collaboration is equal. Korot took full responsibility for the video design of The Cave in interviews: “He gave me the audio for the talking-heads channel. It was up to me to provide the rest and make it work with the score” (in Reich 2002b, 172). As one might well anticipate, given the speech- song- writing tensions surveyed earlier, a consistent critical com- plaint about The Cave has been that, until its third act, where American vernacular speech rhythms come to the fore, Reich’s music is too austere and self- limiting, and is consequently overshadowed by Korot’s multiple video screens. 41. Derrida 1997, 9. 42. The Hebrew expression aliyah, “to go up,” refers both to ascending the pulpit as a reader of Torah and to returning to the Jewish homeland in Palestine. 43. “Writing would indeed be the signifier’s capacity to repeat itself by itself, me- chanically, without a living soul to sustain or attend it in its repetition, that is to say, without truth’s presenting itself anywhere” (Derrida 1997, 111). 44. Reich’s linguistic nativism at the time of The Cave was unapologetic; he freely admitted that requiring all the interviewees to answer in English ironed out their distinctive speech rhythms in a way that could be imagined as utopian or imperial- istic depending on your sympathies: “What I found was that in terms of the different speech- melodies of these groups of speakers, the English language proved to be the great equalizer. There was no characteristic Israeli or Palestinian speech- melody dis- tinct from that of Americans. In general, it was speaking English that dominated the rhythm and cadence of the speakers. The syllables, with their rhythms and accents, dominated the speech melody of all the speakers” (Reich 2002b, 194). For Reich it was self- evident that if he, the composer, could not understand intuitively the rela- tionship of sound- image and meaning in the spoken language with which he was working, there was no possibility that his musical transcriptions would work.

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45. The only live recording ofThe Cave available for study is a low-fidelity, single- camera documentation of the majority of act 1 as it was performed in Strasbourg at the Musica Festival in 2011 (https:// www.youtube.com/ watch?v=U9MTxLCv_ nw, accessed November 28, 2015). It isn’t possible from this video, whose audio track appears to be mixed in mono throughout, to determine whether the mix in the hall had the same stereophonic spatial dimensions as the 1993 studio recording. 46. Tomlinson 1995, 355. 47. It is worth noting that the actual string players in a performance of The Cave do not play along with the first appearance of a given speech sample; as the score notes, the instrumental doubling you hear there is also a sample, coordinated through MIDI, and thus under the direct control of the composer/ conductor. Only after hearing (and thus, symbolically, being instructed by) the MIDI sampler do the live string players begin to play their parts. 48. “In order to combine the taped speech with the string instruments, I selected small speech samples that are more or less clearly pitched, then transcribed them as accurately as possible into musical notation. The strings then literally imitate that speech melody” (Reich 2002b, 152). 49. Derrida 1997, 84. 50. Reich’s vocal transcriptions have been ideologically controversial for some time now. Both Gopinath (2004) and Scherzinger (2005) express serious moral qualms about Reich’s attempts to capture the essence of African voices, either on tape or in drummed rhythms. Scherzinger (2005, n23), taking issue with the way Potter (2000) notates the vocal snippet at the heart of It’s Gonna Rain, implies, I think, that the composer himself misheard it—a claim that Gopinath (2004, 140–41) makes explicitly about the percussive vocables Reich imitated in . Both are concerned with Reich’s appropriative hearing of non-Western voices, but I suspect neither would be surprised at an argument, like the present one, that extends the logic of notation as “appropriation” to all spoken voices, European or otherwise, and then reverses it. Why should we believe that any writing could capture spoken presence without distortion? Is not appropriation-and- distortion inherent in the act of writing itself? Gopinath calls Reich’s transcription “an ethnographic fantasy of self- validation,” and it surely is. Reich would surely be insulted by the implication of ethnocentrism, but perhaps a degree of fantasy and self-mythologizing is inherent to all Western musical writing and, thus, not his unique moral failure: “At the moment of generating a musical notation— moments like those in the Middle Ages, of capital importance for European music history— alphabetic writing declares this absence. By this generation, it moves to capture in its own inscriptive terms an aspect of sung utterance that will always escape it” (Tomlinson 1995, 377). 51. Luttikhuis 1993. 52. Oestreich 1999. 53. Driver 1993. 54. Hall 2006. 55. Maycock 1993. 56. Rothstein 1993.

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57. Reich 2002b, 101. 58. Derrida 1997, 71. 59. Reich 2002b, 129. 60. See Brown, Driver, and Briggs 1994, commentary on Strong’s H6957. 61. See Fink 2011.