"The Mind is Listening": Listening for Meaning in Steve Reich's 'The Desert Music' Item Type text; Electronic Thesis Authors Fisher, Sarah Lynn Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 29/09/2021 22:58:13 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/193300 “THE MIND IS LISTENING” LISTENING FOR MEANING IN STEVE REICH’S THE DESERT MUSIC by Sarah Lynn Fisher A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the SCHOOL OF MUSIC In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF MUSIC In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2007 2 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This thesis has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this thesis are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author. SIGNED: Sarah Lynn Fisher APPROVAL BY THESIS DIRECTOR This thesis has been approved on the date shown below: ______________________________ November 20, 2007 Janet L. Sturman Date Associate Professor of Music 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am especially grateful to my advisor, Dr. Janet Sturman, for her patience and encouragement throughout these last two years of research and writing. Her enthusiasm for my ideas and confidence in my abilities were crucial in times when my own confidence wavered. She has introduced me to works of music criticism that have forever changed (for the better) the way I think about music and has inspired an interest in ethnographic research that I hope to pursue in the future. Our conversations helped to both improve and clarify many of the ideas presented in this document and for this I am most obliged. I also wish to thank the other two members of my graduate committee, Dr. John Brobeck and Dr. Jay Rosenblatt, for kindly offering helpful criticism and for providing examples of the level of scholarship to which I aspire. My immediate family has been unfailingly supportive during this challenging period of my life, and their love means more to me than anything. I wish to acknowledge the loving support of family and friends, including Annette, April, and Autumn McMurrian; Rachelle Mechenbier; my OMA partners and friends Kathryn Mueller and Nathan Kruger; Andrew Diggs; Dan, Kelsey, and Levi Bowman; the staff of Radiocarbon and Meteoritics and Planetary Science; Anishka Lee- Skorepa; Laura Weirich; and Peanut (in memoriam). Alan McMurrian kindly helped to edit and revise several versions of this thesis and has always been available to discuses my ideas and concerns throughout the entire process. This journey has very much been one that we have taken together, and I owe the successful completion of this project to his steadfast encouragement. Finally, I would like to thank my undergraduate professor, Daniel Dominick, for first introducing me to Steve Reich and for playing the Brooklyn Philharmonic recording of The Desert Music for our 20th-Century Music class one Friday afternoon. 4 DEDICATION For my musical patriarch Ronald G. Clark 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES……………………………………………………………………... 6 ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………..................... 7 EPIGRAPH…………………………………………………………………………….. 8 INTRODUCTION - “Is there a sound / addressed / not wholly to the ear?”………… 9 CHAPTER ONE - “Begin, my Friend”: The Genesis and Composition of The Desert Music………………………………………………………………………… 15 CHAPTER TWO - “Well, shall we / think or listen?”: Selected Literature Review…. 29 CHAPTER THREE - “The / theme is difficult / but no more difficult / than the facts to be / resolved.”…………………………………………………………………….. 38 I. Musical Meaning: Definition and Theory………………………………………… 38 II. The Listening Analysis……………………………………………………………47 III. Locating the Desert……………………………………………………………… 53 CONCLUSION - “who most shall advance the light – call it what you may!”……….. 68 APPENDIX: LISTENING TABLES………………………………………………....... 72 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………… 104 6 LIST OF TABLES1 Table 1: Movement I – Fast……………………………………………………………. 72 Table 2: Movement II – Moderate……………………………………………………... 76 Table 3.1: Movement IIIA – Slow……………………………………………………... 81 Table 3.2: Movement IIIB – Moderate………………………………………………… 86 Table 3.3: Movement IIIC – Slow……………………………………………………... 90 Table 4: Movement IV – Moderate……………………………………………………. 95 Table 5: Movement V – Fast…………………………………………………………... 98 1All tables document my listening analysis and appear in the Appendix. Page numbers denote the first page of each table. 7 ABSTRACT This thesis examines The Desert Music by Steve Reich in the context of the composer’s artistic perspective and advocates studying the subjective listening experience as a tool for musical analysis. Challenging conventional approaches in musicology and music theory, this work examines how a specific analytical approach in turn shapes the values assigned to that work. Systematic documentation of the author's listening experience is presented as an application of this premise and as a template to use in subsequent investigations of how other listeners respond to the work. The author concludes, mirroring the ideas implied in The Desert Music itself, that instead of suppressing individual responses as opinions too myriad and divergent to be relevant, we should recognize that these reactions are products of shared cultural experience and that discussing them collectively may lead to powerful revelations about artistic meaning that may not emerge any other way. 8 Leaving California to return east, the fertile desert, (were it to get water) surrounded us, a music of survival, subdued, distant, half heard… William Carlos Williams “The Desert Music” 9 Introduction “Is there a sound addressed / not wholly to the ear?” In the early 1960s, while studying composition at Mills College in San Francisco, California, Steve Reich spent many hours at jazz venues listening to performances by John Coltrane: When I was at Mills College from 1961 to ’63, most of the graduate students were writing pieces which they didn’t play, which one could doubt whether they heard in their heads, and which were so enormously complex that they made the page virtually black, but you wondered if they’d ever be performed. And at night I went to hear John Coltrane, who picks up his saxophone and plays and the music comes out. It was almost a moral dilemma. It would’ve been almost immoral not to follow in Coltrane’s direction because of the musical honesty and authenticity involved.2 Reich recognized that he valued the affective experience of music too highly to continue composing serial music; this calculated, intellectual style, while an appropriate response to World War II in Europe, was “a musical lie” coming from a composer so keenly aware of the American social and musical environment during the 1960s.3 Returning to New York a few years later, Reich began composing in a new style, and his first mature compositions, It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966), achieve their emotional weight from their musical processes as well as their subject matter. These aspects of Reich’s biography illuminate an important artistic position that has guided his compositional career from the 1960s to the present. Reich’s style mentioned above (labeled minimalism by critics) not only grew out of his desire for musical integrity, but it also clarified his intended audience, i.e., who he was writing for 2Steve Reich, “Steve Reich,” interview by Edward Strickland (January 1987), in American Composers: Dialogues on Contemporary Music (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 38. 3Ibid., 46. 10 and how he envisioned his compositions would be heard. While his colleagues at Mills College wrote for music academics at universities, Reich was more at home in the art galleries of downtown New York City, where artists of several disciplines gathered to share their works with a perhaps less critical, but still enthusiastic, crowd.4 By his own admission Reich requires an engaged listener, not necessarily an educated one.5 Aside from his early tape pieces, he also has been careful never to remove completely the human element of live performance from his works, following his interest in the communal performance practices of West African drumming and Balinese gamelan ensembles. While the individualized experience of his compositions remains important, it is clear that Reich also recognizes the affective power of live performance. Given Reich’s musical values, it is puzzling that critical discussions of his works continue to emanate almost exclusively from methods of analysis traditionally applied to Western art music. These methods, which focus on the absolute musical elements of harmony and structure, presuppose that the goal of analysis is to uncover the composer’s compositional process and that the critic should