Steve Reich and Canon: the Polyphony of Influence in Tehillim and Proverb

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Steve Reich and Canon: The Polyphony of Influence in Tehillim and Proverb

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UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI

STEVE REICH AND CANON: THE POLYPHONY OF INFLUENCE IN TEHILLIM AND PROVERB

By Nevena Stanić Kovačević

A THESIS

Submitted to the Faculty of the University of Miami in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music

Coral Gables, Florida

August 2019

UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music

STEVE REICH AND CANON: THE POLYPHONY OF INFLUENCE IN TEHILLIM AND PROVERB

Nevena Stanić Kovačević

Approved:

______Marysol Quevedo, Ph.D. Anne Searcy, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Musicology Assistant Professor of Musicology

______Juan Chattah, Ph.D. Guillermo Prado, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Music Theory Dean of the Graduate School

STANIĆ KOVAČEVIĆ, NEVENA (M.M., Musicology)

Steve Reich and Canon: The Polyphony of Influence (August 2019) in Tehillim and Proverb

Abstract of a thesis at the University of Miami.

Thesis supervised by Professor Marysol Quevedo. No. of pages in text. (102)

From the early 1980s onwards, Steve Reich’s musical influences evolved. Before the 1980s, he drew from non-Western music and later from Western classical composers, such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Perotinus. The purpose of this study is to investigate the aesthetic shifts in Reich’s opus and also to explore Reich’s claims about changes of influence in his music and its consequences in the reception of his work. Through a close examination of Tehillim (1981) and Proverb (1995), I explore Reich’s position within postminimalism and his relation to the musical tradition of counterpoint from historical, stylistic, and analytical perspectives. I also discuss Reich’s poetical narratives and style in relation to both the early music movement and US and European “spiritual” minimalism.

I argue that the change in Reich’s aesthetics and narratives around his work is the result of three factors: Reich’s turn to postminimalism; his turn to spirituality and

Judaism; and his connection with important classical music institutions and the early music movement. Reich turned to Bach and Perotinus in part because of specific elements in their compositional technique, such as imitation, doubling, and isorhythm.

These new elements in Reich’s work affected his style, specifically his treatment of melody, text, and canonic technique. In Tehillim, Reich integrates psalm text into his music for the first time, which affects his approach to melody and rhythm. He also implements canonic technique in a more traditional way than in his earlier compositions.

This approach was later applied in Proverb. Additionally, both compositions draw from

spirituality: Tehillim is inspired by a psalm text and Reich’s Jewish background, while

Proverb connects to spirituality more broadly, through Perotinus’s early sacred music and

the early music movement in general. Thus, Reich’s reference to Bach’s and, later,

Perotinus’s music, is personal, artistic, and historical.

Through these stylistic and spiritual influences in his opus, demonstrated in

Tehillim and Proverb, Reich shows the elasticity of his aesthetics and its importance in the establishment of different communicative gestures between the composer, audience, and critics. The narrative Reich presents in his frequent interviews has strong connections with classical music that further makes his compositions more identifiable and accessible to the audience. Reich’s narrative also coincides with the acknowledgment of his work among renowned institutions, ensembles, and audiences. The increased accessibility of his music allowed audiences to reconsider his earlier, previously undervalued works.

Therefore, such high appreciation of Reich’s music intersects with its successive commissions and performances. Additionally, Reich’s public engagement with presenting his work within the Western counterpoint musical tradition led to the canonization of this composer in the classical music world.

To my brother Jovan.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF EXAMPLES ...... v

INTRODUCTION ...... 1 I. Reich’s Aesthetic Turn from the 1980s ...... 3 II. Literature Review and Terminology Distinctions ...... 8 III. Methodology ...... 17 IV. Chapter Overview ...... 19

CHAPTER 1: REICH, MINIMALIST SPIRITUALISM, AND BACH IN TEHILLIM… 22 I. Minimalism and “Spiritual” Minimalism ...... 24 II. Reich’s Jewish identity and Tehillim ...... 30 III. Tehillim and Bach ...... 43

CHAPTER 2: THE POLYPHONY OF INFLUENCE IN REICH’S CAREER AND PROVERB ...... 50 I. Influences in Reich’s Work ...... 51 II. Institutions and Canonization of Reich’s Work ...... 58 III. Reich’s Relationship to the Early Music Movement ...... 65 IV. Proverb in Canon ...... 69 V. Communicative Gestures in Proverb ...... 77

CONCLUSION: REICH AND CANON ...... 82

WORKS CITED…………… ...... 96

LIST OF EXAMPLES

Example 1.1: Text in Tehillim… ...... 36

Example 1.2: The opening of Tehillim, female voice section, section A, mm. 1- 29 ...... 38

Example 1.3: The beginning of section D in Tehillim, Part I, with clarinet doubling of vocal parts and drones in the string sections ...... 39

Example 1.4: The beginning of Part II in Tehillim, horn and oboe doubling voices, mm. 1-4. 44

Example 1.5: Comparison between Bach’s and Reich’s imitative melodies ...... 45 a) The beginning of Bach’s Aria Duetto of Cantata No. 4 b) The beginning of Part III in Reich’s Tehillim

Example 2.1: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, aphorism from the manuscript written on September 2, 1946 ...... 71

Example 2.2: Perotinus’s influence; a comparison between tenor lines in Proverb and Viderunt Omnes ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 73

Example 2.3: Harmonized, non-canonic sections in Proverb ...... 75

a) Sections 2 (mm. 198-224), mm. 200-6, augmentation

b) Coda (mm. 628-58), mm. 631-40, without augmentation

Example 2.4: The opening of Proverb, mm.1-11, soprano theme ...... 79

INTRODUCTION

The whole phasing idea is a footnote to the history of canon in Western music.1

Steve Reich

From the early 1980s onwards, Steve Reich’s claims over influences in his music

changed from non-Western music toward Western classical music.2 Particularly, Johann

Sebastian Bach’s and Perotinus’s music influenced the aesthetics of two of Reich’s vocal-

instrumental compositions – Tehillim (1981) and Proverb (1995). New compositional

procedures are reflected in Reich’s intention to reference Bach’s sacred Cantata No. 4

Christ lag in Todes Banden in Tehillim and Perotinus’s Viderunt Omnes in Proverb. In

Tehillim, Reich sets music to text that, for the first time, shapes his approach to melody

and rhythm; instead of short repeating melodic and rhythmic patterns, Reich implements long melodic phrases that follow the flux of the words. In both works, Reich traditionally uses canonic technique: principles of counterpoint and imitation become more dominant from this period on in Reich’s output as opposed to the technique of phase shifting in his compositions from the 1960s and early 1970s, in which one of the voices would gradually speed up when compared to another. Tehillim is also Reich’s first piece that directly references his Jewish identity, which the composer embraced in the mid-1970s.

Through psalm texts in Hebrew language, Reich set a new path in his career that he continued in many of his later works, such as Different Trains, The Cave, and Three

1 Éric Darmon and Franck Mallet, “Steve Reich: Phase to Face,” directed by Éric Darmon and Franck Mallet, Documentary film, Berlin: EuroArts Music International/Idéale audience, 2011. 2 Drumming, composed in 1971, is one of the examples of African rhythm influences in Reich’s work during the 1970s. This argument will be further elaborated in the thesis.

Tales. However, both Tehillim and Proverb represent paradigmatic examples of a shift in

Reich’s aesthetics through his new relationship to musical references, text, voice, and spirituality. In addition, and given the new rhetorical gestures in his music, Reich’s work became increasingly accessible to different audiences and institutions.3 This change also coincided with a shift in the reception of his work and Reich’s claims over the influences in his music.

From Tehillim on, Reich started relating more strongly to different aspects of

Western canon. Since then, he has shown great interest in classical music composed

before 1750.4 In a 2002 interview, Reich explained that listening to Bach’s music inspired him to explore early music.5 In this regard, in this thesis I interrogate Reich’s own understanding of his music’s role in the history of counterpoint through his writings, interviews, and musical references to Bach’s and Perotinus’s sacred works. I examine the changes in Reich’s aesthetics in relation to his poetical narratives and Jewish identity in the context of US postminimalism, European “spiritual” minimalism, and the early music movement.6 By identifying musical sources and references that were influential in

3 In the 1960s and 1970s, minimalist performances were more ambient and less formal than traditional concerts of classical music. Kyle Gann concludes they embodied a new performance paradigm where “audience members might lie down or sit on the floor and could come and go as they pleased.” Kyle Gann, “A Technically Definable Stream of Postminimalism, Its Characteristics and Its Meaning,” in Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, eds. Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll ap Siôn (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 39-60, 39-40. However, from the mid-1970s and early 1980s, specifically Reich’s works started being performed more often at classical-concert venues which will be further discussed in chapter two. 4 In many interviews from this period as well as studies later published in Writings on Music 1965- 2000, Reich confirms his interest in this repertoire, which will be further examined in the thesis. In these sources, Reich stated numerous times his early musical influences and motivation to pursue music. 5 Gabrielle Zuckerman, “Interview with Steve Reich,” American Public Media, July 2002, accessed February 15, 2019: http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/interview_reich.html 6 Nicholas Kenyon states that the early music movement “is not so much concerned with a period of music as with an artistic ideal.” In his opinion, the repertoire of the movement spreads from classical antiquity to the early twentieth century. He added that: “’modern’ musicians… interpret much of this same repertoire. What distinguishes the advocates of early music is that they aim at ‘authentic performance.’” Nicholas Kenyon, Authenticity and Early Music (Oxford: OUP, 1988), 228. In my thesis, early music

Reich’s opus from a chronological and historical perspective, in this thesis I specifically

chronicle Reich’s relationship to Western classical music before 1750. Given that,

starting in the 1980s, Reich’s music became more accessible to larger audiences, in this

thesis I illuminate some aspects of institutionalization, wider recognition, and

canonization of Reich’s work in the classical music world.

I. Reich’s Aesthetic Turn from the 1980s

In his early career, Reich was influenced by non-Western music. He developed an

interest in Gamelan music and West-African drumming during his music education. After

doing an extensive study in percussion and obtaining a degree in philosophy at Cornell

University, he continued his education at Juilliard and Mills College. In California, Reich

was taught by Luciano Berio, when he discovered that he was not inclined to compose

using twelve-tone technique or serialism.7

During his studies, in the early 1960s, Reich encountered African music firsthand

through recordings, and later at the Ojai Festival north of Los Angeles. Gunther Schuller,

who would become one of the most influential American musicians and historians,

introduced Reich to a book of West African music transcriptions.8 The quest towards new sounds, techniques, and experiments led him, as a modernist composer, to a variety of

movement is a term related to artists who aim to ‘authentically’ perform music of Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque period, or contemporary works that demand such ‘authentic’ interpretation/sound. 7 Steve Reich, Official website, accessed October 7, 2018. https://www.stevereich.com/biography 8 Gabrielle Zuckerman, “Interview with Steve Reich,” op. cit. In 1970, in an interview with Michael Nyman, Reich pointed out that he was motivated to travel to Ghana to study drumming through A. M. Jones's book Studies in African Music which would fulfill his wish to increase his musical abilities. Since he studied rudimentary Western drumming when he was fourteen, this trip was just a continuation of his interests in percussion, percussion patterns, and music in general. According to Reich, studying non- Western music seriously influences natural and organic approach to it, and not only the extraction of some of its ‘exotic’ elements. Steve Reich, Writings on Music, op. cit., 53-9.

other sources outside of Western classical music and, eventually, to his research trip to

Ghana in 1971.9

Thereafter, tape recording experiments along with Ghanaian and Balinese music

impacted his aesthetics in the mid-1960s and early 1970s. Decades later, in his interview

after 2000, Reich began talking about this method as a type of a ‘micro’ canon in unison

relying on the Western contrapuntal tradition.10 Reich explained that experiments with tape opened his views to the Western classical technique of canon. The nonsynchronicity between two tapes when they were played at the same time inspired him with the idea of the phase shifting method in which one of the voices would gradually speed up compared to the other. Reich stated that phasing is a canon with a short melodic pattern instead of an extended melody, “where the rhythmic distance between the first voice and the second is flexible and gradually changing.”11 Musicologist Rebecca Kim supported Reich’s view by naming the phasing technique as the outgrowth of canonic technique.12 The changes in

Reich’s influences and techniques began to be accepted by scholars, critics, and

musicians who followed him.

In the composer’s notes for Proverb, Reich explained the structure of the piece by

referring to the canon. The first time Reich discussed canons in his writings was in 1988.

9 However, in the book, Writings about Music 1965-2000, Reich stated that these influences of non-Western music initially came from Western classical music and compositions by Debussy and Bartók. Steve Reich, Writings on Music, 1965–2000, ed. by Paul Hillier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 161. A large body of studies explore the element of non-Western music’s exoticism in music by Debussy and Bartόk, However, exoticism is not present in Reich’s music. His intention was to use compositional and structural elements of music from Africa or Asia. Writing about the future of music in 1970, Reich hoped that non-Western music, particularly African, Indonesian, And Indian music, “will serve as new structural models for Western musicians” and not, and an exoticism fashion, as new models of sound. Steve Reich, Writings on Music, op. cit., 51. 10 Rebecca Y. Kim, “From New York to Vermont: Conversation with Steve Reich,” New York City, October 12, 2000 and Vermont, October 25, 2000. https://www.stevereich.com/articles/NY-VT.html. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid.

In the chapter “Non-Western Music and the Western Composer” from Writings on Music,

Reich explains that the canon and fugue are among those genres that are only well learned by professionals or well-trained amateurs. Although Reich elevates the elitist knowledge of the Western composer, he also points out the limitations of one’s approach to understanding the non-Western music structures, which is often based on the

subjective perception and knowledge of non-Western music.13 In this way, Reich

balances between his own elitist Western position and his audience’s perception of the

non-Western elements present in his early works. For example, before the mid-1970s and

especially 1980s, a part of the audience accepted and appreciated Reich’s stylistic non-

Western elements and the other part of the audience who were more interested in

traditional Western classical repertoire rejected Reich’s experimental style.

With his turn to Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music in the 1980s, Reich

began to situate himself more firmly within a musical canon. Specifically, in Tehillim

Reich incorporates a reference to music history, aiming to double instruments and voices

in Bach’s manner specifically alluding to his sacred cantatas. Similarly, in Proverb, he

refers to a Medieval composer, Perotinus, finding inspiration in his organa. In 2004,

when Reich’s book Writings on Music 1965-2000 was published, he made a connection

between Four Organs (1970) and the process of augmentation in Leoninus’s and

Perotinus’s French organum.14 In this book’s chapter on the piece Music for Eighteen

Musicians (1976), Reich emphasizes those elements between Perotinus’s and his music,

13 In 2002, by explaining canons in music, Reich asked a question what canon was. His answer was: “That’s Johann Sebastian Bach, that’s Bartok… that’s 85 percent of everything I’ve ever written.” Gabrielle Zuckerman, “Interview with Steve Reich,” op. cit. 14 Steve Reich, Writings on Music, op. cit., 51.

stating that every chord from the opening section “is then stretched out as the basic

pulsing harmony for a five-minute piece, very much as a single note in a cantus firmus or

chant melody of a twelfth-century organum by Perotin[us] might be stretched out for

several minutes as the harmonic center for a section of the organum.”15 Reich later began

making even firmer connections between his work and the Notre Dame School. It is

evident in Proverb and visible in many other writings that this connection strengthened

the relation between his music and early music. For example, Paul Hillier, a performer of

early music and Reich’s works and the editor of his book, claimed in 2004 that canon

“most closely corresponds to the idea of different views of the same object,” and that it

dominates Reich's musical processes.16 He added that “this feature links him to

composers as far back as Perotin[us], Machaut, Dufay, Josquin, and, of course, Bach.”17

Although both Hillier and Reich find similarities between Reich’s music and early music features, Hillier, unlike Reich, does not mention early music as influential on Reich’s work.

Reich gradually builds the narrative around his music in the 1980s and later in his interviews, public speeches, his documentary titled Phase to Face, and in his book that summarizes his opus before 2000.18 In a 1976 interview with Michael Nyman, Reich

stated, for the first time, that he is not interested in minimal music, but that his

compositional proclivity draws from the European music composed between 1200 and

1750. The repertoire before Bach may be considered somewhat marginal compared to the

15 Idem, 89. 16 Paul Hillier, “Introduction,” in Writings on Music, op. cit., 4. 17 Ibid. 18 Éric Darmon and Franck Mallet, “Steve Reich...,” op. cit.

traditional canon of Western music (principally related to the classical music of the 18th and 19th centuries). Reich’s approach to early music in this period may thus represent his

reconciliation between avant-garde and tradition in his opus. However, even in his

references to the history of early music, Reich’s aspirations led to this lesser-known or

‘avant-garde’ side of music repertoire.19 I argue that these references related to the non-

traditional classical musical canon in his postminimalist works are present to distinguish

Reich’s style from, for example, neo-romantic composers of his time. In this regard,

according to Michael Nyman, a minimalist composer and critic, minimal music is rather

complex in its simplicity and, hence, unique. In 1980, he stated that “just as pre-

thirteenth-century and non-Western music often present surprisingly complex perceptual

problems for the listener reared on European classical music, so too does this ‘simple’

music that I have chosen to call experimental.”20 In a close collaboration between Nyman and Reich that began with their interview in 1970, both composers were making connections between Medieval and minimalist music. Thus, it is not surprising that

Reich’s narratives on the interrelation between early music and his music correlate with

Nyman’s views on this matter.

Namely, Reich often states that he has “learned [an] enormous amount”21 from

Perotinus, including the way to use extreme augmentation.22 From Medieval,

Renaissance, and Baroque contrapuntal music, Reich found canon “a powerful

19 Although early music cannot be considered as classical mainstream, it is significant due to a development of notation, florid organum, and polyphonic technique. 20 Michael Nyman, “Against Intellectual Complexity in Music,” October 13 (Summer 1980), 81-9. Nyman’s text was published in 1980 as a revised version of a text delivered at the "New Simplicity in Contemporary Music" conference at the Aspen Institute, Berlin, June 13-16, 1977. 21 The Graduate Center, CUNY, “Steve Reich: Playing Music/Talking Music,” (Published on February 27, 2014), 1:03:20, accessed October 7, 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI25bqbzzNs 22 Steve Reich, Writings on Music, op. cit., 161.

8 compositional tool that can be applied to any sound whatsoever.”23 Reich’s procedures of phase shifting,24 addition, and subtraction of notes, imitation, and hocketing are important for the construction of his canons.25 The doubling technique in Tehillim, which Reich claims he takes from Bach’s second verse of Christ lag in Todes Banden cantata, is important in the context of a narrative around Reich’s work related to a Western classical perspective. From Tehillim onwards, Reich emphasizes the significance of Western musical influences in his music.26 Referring to a musical canon rather than non-Western music gives Reich more authority in the Western classical world that still cherishes the distinction between “high” and “low” art forms. These categories are often differentiated with the help of the Western canon that includes the canonic technique as one of its distinct elements.

II. Literature Review and Terminology Distinctions

Studies undertaken by multiple critics establish the groundwork for a comparison between Reich’s style before and after the 1980s and for examining Reich’s style in

Tehillim and Proverb. For example, “Steve Reich: Music as a Gradual Process: Part I”

23 Idem, 139. Although, Reich finds canon as the foundation of works in this period, he also states that it is not excluded in music from Bach's Musical Offering, to Bartók's Mikrokosmos, and Webern's Symphony Op.21. Idem, 140. 24 Gann traces the phase shifting tendency in Henry Cowell’s book New Musical Resources (1930), “in which Cowell suggested basing works on a ‘harmony of links’, by which he denoted different rhythmic cycles running concurrently and going out of phase with each other.” Kyle Gann, “A Technically Definable...,” op. cit., 43. 25 Steve Reich, Writings on Music, op. cit., 140. The composer wrote: “The most productive of these is to gradually substitute notes for rests—sound for silence—until a canon is constructed. People became aware of my use of canonic structure much later with Tehillim because the subjects were longer and more traditionally melodic.” Reich also stated: “Tehillim is a piece where I consulted Bach directly and a particular piece…” Ibid. 26 Steve Reich, “Steve Reich on Tehillim + Bach”, Interview at Miller Theatre on May 15, accessed October 28, 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=creTXfBzjBg Reich points that, despite the similar procedure, “the sounds [of those compositions] are extremely different.” Ibid.

(1980) and “Steve Reich: Music as a Gradual Process Part II” (1981) are Robert

Schwarz’s extensive studies on Steve Reich. The latter study offers a formal analysis of

Tehillim. Schwarz’s book Minimalists (1996), as well as Wim Mertens’s American

Musical Minimalism (1980), both provide a general historical and stylistic framework for

the exploration of Reich’s work within the genre. Two other authors who examine

minimalism are a composer Michael Nyman’s (1974, 1999) and a theorist Jonathan

Bernard (2003). To examine Reich’s canonic technique and its possible relations to

organum and text, in this thesis I will engage with Ronald Woodley’s article “Steve

Reich’s Proverb, Canon, and a Little Wittgenstein” (2014). Woodley’s study provides

historiographical insights and analytical methods for early compositional techniques

applied in Proverb as well as an interpretation of possible meanings of Wittgenstein’s

text in the piece.

In a broader sense, writings about minimalism in music began to appear in the

1980s (with the exception of Nyman’s chapter) when minimalism as a movement was already over. These writings originate from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, decades when interest in musical minimalism and its postulates started expanding. In the majority of

these writings, authors use the term “American” to geographically describe minimalist works. All of these narratives distinguish four main representatives of the movement.

They canonically establish La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich

as the only minimalists in the United States and the world in the 1960s. Thus, after the

1970s, their work was perceived as exceptional in comparison to those composers of

similar interests in the United States and Europe. From the 1970s onwards, minimalism, specifically its technique, spread through the American hemisphere and Western and

Eastern Europe. In this regard, I argue that the term “American minimalism,” if used to

describe works by US composers, has certain political and ideological implications in

these writings. Distinguishing the minimalist musical movement in the US as both unique

and American places Young, Riley, Glass, and Reich and the culture they belong to as superior when compared to, for example, Eastern European minimalists. I discuss this further in chapter one.

One of the first books that defined and described minimalism is Michael Nyman’s

1974 work Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond,27 in which he introduced the term

minimalism in music, appropriating it from visual arts and applying it to the analysis of

some of the key compositions of four US minimalist composers.28 In 1983, Wim Mertens also wrote about minimalist works in American Minimal Music: La Monte Young, Terry

Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, describing their compositional principles from a similar perspective.29 Writings on minimalism became somewhat more popular in the 1990s.

Some of the important books are Robert K. Schwartz’s Minimalists30 and Keith Potter’s

Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass.31

These, as the previously mentioned sources, explore the four most influential minimalist

27 Michael Nyman, Experimental Music. Cage and Beyond, (New York: Schirmer Books, Macmillan Publishing, 1974). 28 During the 1970s, Reich ascribed similarities between his music and works of art by a sculptor Richard Serra, filmmaker Michael Snow, artist Sol LeWitt. In Jonathan W. Bernard, “Minimalism, Postminimalism, and the Resurgence of Tonality in Recent American Music,” American Music 21, 1 (2003): 132. More about minimalism in plastic arts and the definition of the term in: Jonathan W. Bernard, “The Minimalist Aesthetic in the Plastic Arts and in Music,” Perspectives of New Music 31 (1992): 86-132. 29 Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (London: Kahn and Averill, 1983). 30 Robert K. Schwartz, Minimalists (London: Phaidon Press, 1996). 31 Keith Potter’s Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 2000).

composers and their works in the minimalist phase, thus establishing a historical canon of their greatness.

According to Timothy Johnson, minimalism can be observed as an aesthetic, style, and/or technique. In Johnson’s discussion in “Minimalism: Aesthetic, Style, or

Technique” (1994), he lists the principal features of minimalist technique as a continuous formal structure, bright timbre, even rhythm, simple harmonic palette, a lack of extended melodic lines, and repetitive rhythmic patterns.32 Trying to emphasize the importance of

the influence of the movement through its popularity and the popularity of minimalist

techniques from the mid-1970s, Johnson suggests that through observing minimalism as a

technique, “composers and listeners may begin to appreciate minimalism more fully.”33

He argues that “pieces focusing primarily on the process alone or pieces that lack goals and motion toward those goals best exemplify the delineation of minimalism as an aesthetic”34 while “short, repetitive rhythmic patterns are ubiquitous, and their

organization, combination, and individual shapes provide the primary points of interest in

the style.”35 Within Johnson’s categorization, only works by Reich and Glass reflect all three aspects of minimalism (aesthetic, style, and technique) in their works after the mid-

1970s. In the context of this study, in Reich’s music, minimalism is present through all of these categories even after the mid-1970s, in its ‘post’ era.

Regarding Johnson’s standpoint on Reich as a representative of minimalism, I engage with the term minimalism even when I analyze Reich's compositional approach in

32 Timothy A. Johnson, “Minimalism: Aesthetic, Style, or Technique,” The Musical Quarterly, 78, 4, 1. (December 1994): 751. 33 Idem, 770. 34 Idem, 744. 35 Idem, 748.

his postminimalist works. Reich’s postminimalist compositions are still based on

minimalist principles. Therefore, Reich’s postminimalist works represent a continuation

of aesthetics, style, and technique he established in the 1960s. In my thesis, I characterize

Reich as a minimalist composer.

Although the term postminimalism is well accepted in the literature from the

1980s, there is disagreement on the distinction between minimalism and

postminimalism.36 For example, while Johnson argues that the minimalist technique exists in postmodernism (enough to characterize some pieces as minimalist), pointing out that the minimalist technique has been appropriated by postmodern composers.37 Kyle

Gann also recognizes the change in minimalist style in the late 1970s and describes it in

his book American Music in the Twentieth Century.38 Minimalist music from the 1970s

retained some earlier features, for example, a steady pulse and consonances, but it could

often have surprising (non-minimalist) elements. In 1980, Nyman described minimal

music as music reduced to a minimal amount of contrast that is based on musical

elements exposed at the beginning of the piece.39 In 2003, music theorist Jonathan

Bernard defined minimalism fundamentally as an aesthetic “while it is really

postminimalism that conveniently labels a whole host of styles and techniques.”40

Comparing postminimalism and new romanticism, Gann argues that new romanticism

36 Tracing the origin of the term postminimalism in media, Gann discovered that the critic John Rockwell started using it first in 1981 in The New York Times. Kyle Gann, “A Technically Definable...,” op. cit., 40, according to John Rockwell, “Concert: New Music of California,” The New York Times, June 6, 1983, 13. 37 Timothy A. Johnson, “Minimalism...,” op. cit., 38 Kyle Gann, American Music in the Twentieth Century, (Belmont: Schirmer Books; Prentice Hall International, 1997). 39Michael Nyman, “Against Intellectual Complexity in Music,” op. cit., 81-9 40 Jonathan W. Bernard, “Minimalism, Postminimalism, and the Resurgence of Tonality,” American Music 21, No.1 (Spring 2003), 133

represents a pre-serialist return to the past while “postminimalism has nothing to do with

the past, least of all with European Romanticism, it builds on minimalism and looks

forward.”41 What distinguishes minimalism from postminimalism is, according to Gann,

its “audible structure” or the strict and controlled gradual process that can be fully

comprehended while it is happening.42

During the 1960s, US minimalism was characterized by the reduction of musical

material, repetition, non-narrativity, lack of contrast, and the influence of jazz and

popular music. Its “audible structure” within a gradual minimalist process may or may

not be recognized in postminimalist pieces. For example, based on the analysis of

Tehillim and Proverb, “audible structure” still exists in parts in these postminimalist works. Postminimalism is a continuation of some aspects of minimalism, primarily minimalist technique that, in regard to Reich’s music, does not have to be strict,

controlled, gradual, or “audible” anymore, but it may contain some of those elements.

However, unlike minimalist music, postminimalist compositions can often be subjective

with emotional climaxes and harmonic variety.43 Other characteristics of postminimalist

works, according to Schwarz, may be the combination of the minimalistic strictness and

romantic passion, minimalistic technique with the function of emotional climax,

harmonic variety and faster harmonic pace in general.44

Bernard established two categories for a postminimalist artist: the first is that the

artist began as a minimalist and his music later had some traces of minimalism, and the

41 Ibid. 42 Marija Masnikosa, “A Theoretical Model of Postminimalism and Two Brief ‘Case Studies,” in Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, eds. Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll ap Siôn (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 299-300. 43 Idem, 298. 44 Robert Schwarz, Minimalists, op. cit., 170-179.

14 second that the artist was creating after the peak of minimalism in response or partly in opposition to it. Within these criteria, Reich and Glass are, according to Bernard, postminimalist composers of the first category, while John Adams and Michael Torke belong to the second.45 Bernard argues that Timothy Johnson’s approach to minimalism is based only on a level of technique while he would describe it as fundamentally aesthetic and as a matter of style.46 Bernard considers that postminimalism can only be “a placemarker” – or a term that covers many aesthetic and stylistic orientations that are described by more precise terms.47

Given the common standpoint that Reich’s compositions from the 1960s and early

1970s represent modernist works, and that later works are proclaimed as postmodernist,48

it is important to draw a difference between their modernist and postmodernist elements.

Commenting on the element of quotation, music theorist Jonathan Kramer explains that

modernist composers “often want to take over, to own, to demonstrate their mastery of

that which they are quoting, either by placing it in modernist context or by distorting

it.”49 On the contrary, in his opinion “postmodernists are more content to let the music

45 Jonathan W. Bernard, “Minimalism...,” op. cit., 112-33, 127. He recognizes that minimalism in music not only draws from arts, but also makes “a valid and convincing analogy” to plastic arts of the 1960s. Idem, 113. Bernard traces this analogy in the context of mutual elements such as repetitiveness or gradual changes of patterns. Jonathan W. Bernard, “The Minimalist Aesthetic...,” op. cit. 86-132. He also notes William Duckworth’s piece Time Curve Preludes (1979) as “filled with allusions to the solo piano literature of past eras” that draws from minimalism. Idem, 128. Many scholars point out, as well as Masnikosa in here article’s case study, that Duckworth’s piece is one of the first postminimalist works that has a significant reference to the music past. Gann notices a variety of postminimalist technique in the 24 movements of this composition. Kyle Gann, “A Technically Definable..., op. cit., 43. 46 Jonathan W. Bernard, “Minimalism, Postminimalism...,” op. cit., 133. 47 Bernard states: “It would appear that postminimalism can only signify matters of technique, effectively as vestiges of minimalism, since the composers in question are so diverse in aesthetic and stylistic orientation; all have seized upon elements of minimalism but have gone in very different directions with them.” Idem, 130. 48 For example, Jonathan Kramer categorized Tehillim in that manner. Jonathan D. Kramer, “The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism,” Current Musicology 66, Spring 1999, 7. 49 Idem, 18.

they refer to or quote simply be what it is, offered with neither distortion nor musical

commentary.”50 However, postmodernist quotations in Tehillim and Proverb may contain

the commentary as well, not just by the composer but also by the listener and the

audience. Both of these postminimalist works also include the minimalist technique as a

part of their postmodern setting.51

Including Reich’s Tehillim as one of the postmodern pieces of music, Kramer explains that postmodern works “do not so much conserve as radically transform the past,

as—each in its own way—they simultaneously embrace and repudiate history.”52

However, Kramer states that such repudiation of modernism or its continuation has aspects of both a break and an extension which “does not respect boundaries between sonorities and procedures of the past and of the present.”53 Among Kramer’s sixteen traits

of a postmodern work, several are applicable to Reich’s Tehillim and Proverb so that music is not autonomous “but as relevant to cultural, social, and political context,”

“includes quotations of or references to music of many traditions and cultures,”

“encompasses pluralism and eclecticism,” and/or “presents multiple meanings and multiple temporalities” which can also depend on a listener.54 Despite the categorization,

Kramer also believed that it is futile to label a work as exclusively postmodern because

there are no rigid boundaries for it.55 However, most contemporary composers are aware

50 Idem, 9. 51 About style, Johnson writes: “The definition of minimalism as a style emphasizes the relationships among the various composers of minimal music and attempts to draw minimalist pieces and composers together under one rubric.” Ibid, 748. Kyle Gann defines postminimalism as something obvious when the work retains phase-shifting, additive (or subtractive), or any other strict process. Kyle Gann, “Technically Definable...,” op. cit., 43. 52 Jonathan D. Kramer, “The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism,” op. cit., 7. 53 Idem, 10. 54 Idem, 10-11. 55 Ibid. Kramer believed that postmodernism is more of an attitude than a historical period. He presented social saturation and the postmodern self as important for understanding postmodernism.

of the postmodern values in their culture with its expression in a socially saturated

civilization.56

Discussing postmodernism and postminimalism, musicologist Marija Masnikosa

suggests a division of postminimalism based on compositional stylistic features.57 She analyzes the intertextuality of postminimalist discourse through the postmodernist

‘double coding,’ which is opposite to the ‘singly-coded’ modernist minimalism. Based on this, she introduces two types of postminimalism: postmodernist minimalism, among which are minimalist processes “onto which the traces, codes or procedures of other

(non-minimalist) types of music are ‘grafted,’” and postminimalist postmodernism, that includes postmodernist works with significant non-minimalist segments.58 According to

Masnikosa, postminimalist postmodernism clearly suggests stylistic polyvalence and

openness in heterogeneous works in which minimalist technique has a significant, if not a

decisive, role. Hence, the label ‘postminimalist postmodernism’ should be understood as

one of the ‘stylistic’ components of the analyzed work: as a determinant, that means that

a composition is not only postminimalist but also postmodernist in a different (non-

minimalist) manner.59 Both Tehillim and Proverb are based on a minimalist repetitive

technique and Reich’s minimalist style. However, they include significant non-minimalist

segments such as extensive melodic lines and harmonic sonorities that are not in an

Namely, “people come to contact with so many other people, with divergent personalities and values, that the self is constantly in flux, always bending under the influence of others.” Idem, 13-15. 56 Idem, 18. Discussing the nature and origins of musical postmodernism, Kramer emphasized the importance of sociological and cultural reasons for an artist to become postmostmodern. Jonathan D. Kramer, “The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism,” op. cit., 7. 57 Masnikosa’s chapter, “A Theoretical Model of Postminimalism and Two Brief ‘Case Studies,” is among the latest source that includes texts both on minimalism and postminimalism. Marija Masnikosa, “A Theoretical Model...,” op. cit., 297-314. 58 Idem, 301-302 59 Masnikosa adds that “For example, a postminimalist postmodernist work can simultaneously also be an exponent of postmodernist romanticism or some other tendency of this kind.” Idem, 303.

extremely slow harmonic rhythm.60 My thesis will analyze and observe them as

postminimalist postmodern works.

Related to the above theories, in this thesis, I categorize Reich as a minimalist

composer, even when it discusses his postminimalist music. From the mid-1970s, Reich

continues to use his minimalist techniques and style through different artistic

circumstances and tendencies. Since Tehillim and Proverb have significant segments of non-minimalist music or, as Gann described, surprising non-minimalist elements, both pieces can be categorized as postminimalist. Observing them from the perspective of postmodernism, Tehillim and Proverb have many features that could characterize them as postmodern, and some of them are already mentioned by Kramer. Thus, I will further employ the term postminimalist postmodernism as a stylistic direction in an analytical approach to Tehillim and Proverb. By tracing their postminimalist and non-minimalist elements, I define their stylistic placement within Reich’s opus.

III. Methodology

To reflect on the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque influence in Reich’s work, my research explores the composer’s writings, interviews, and notes on his compositions.

Through the historical and analytical perspectives of scores and secondary readings, I critically examine Reich’s poetical statements and address his contrapuntal style. In relation to Reich’s aesthetics and self-positioning within American music and minimalism, in this thesis, I analyze Reich’s writings: Writings on Music 1965-2000, which Reich published in collaboration with Paul Hillier; essays Music as a Gradual

60 Timothy A. Johnson, “Minimalism...,” op. cit., 748.

Process from 1968; and Writings about Music from 1974. They provide Reich’s relevant statements and explanations for most of his compositions. Other sources include the composer’s numerous interviews and the documentary Phase to Face (2011). In addition,

I address the reception of Reich’s music through the role of institutions and narratives around it, as well as specific narratives related to the establishment of the Western musical canon. This approach encompasses Reich’s aspiration towards spirituality from the 1980s in relation to the early music movement and the “spiritual” minimalist

‘movement’ in Europe from the mid-1970s. Analytical segments of this study cover writings on organum and canon presented in close readings of Tehillim and Proverb.

I base the discussion between Western canon and Reich’s work on Philip V.

Bohlman’s writings about canon in music. According to ethnomusicologist Bohlman’s study, canons require some measure of loyalty from those who advocate them.61

Musicologists traditionally thought of it as a body of representative works that are the manifestations of political and ideological principles, such as ideas of greatness or

genius.62

Musicologists, musicians, businesspeople, and significant others are among

agents who participate in the canonizing process. Bohlman calls them canonizers among

which are also institutions, conservatories, record companies, and music publishers.63

Agents and other canonizers create canons possessing “a considerable measure of

authority.”64 Bohlman adds that canon formation “depends on agents, at the very least the

61 Philip V. Bohlman, “Epilogue: Music and Canons,” in Disciplining Music : Musicology and Its Canons, ed. Bohlman Bergeron, Katherine Bergeron, and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 201. 62 Ibid. 63 Idem, 205. 64 Ibid.

canonizer and the audience for which she creates a canon.”65 In this regard, canon

established around Reich and his work depends on scholarly writings, score and record

publications, and institutions that perform and commission his work. One of the important agents in the process of canonization is Reich himself who often performs his music as well as talks and writes about it.

IV. Chapter Overview

I present a wide range of influences in Reich’s work in the two main chapters of the thesis, with a focus on Reich’s music from the 1980s that includes references to

Bach’s and Perotinus’s music. Through Tehillim and Proverb, I analyze Reich’s approach to counterpoint technique and his use of canon, imitation, long phrases, pedal points, melody, repetitiveness, rhythm, and pulse in the context of early and Baroque music.

Reich’s treatment of voice and its timbral aspects in his work prove his connections with the early music movement.

In chapter one, “Reich, Minimalist Spiritualism, and Bach in Tehillim,” I shed light on Reich’s turn to Judaism and Bach’s influences on this work. Tehillim is a vocal- instrumental piece in which Reich connects to his own spirituality through the Hebrew psalm text, in this chapter I present Tehillim in a wider context of European “spiritual” minimalism, a counterpart to writings on American minimalism. Stylistically, Reich significantly changes his approach to voice, text, and canonic technique in Tehillim. It is the first piece in which Reich tries to refer not only to his previous works (mainly through compositional technique and form) but also to a sacred work by another composer,

65 Idem, 203.

Johann Sebastian Bach. When composing Tehillim, Reich acknowledged Bach’s

approach to doubling instrumental and vocal parts between voices and winds in his

Cantata No. 4. I examine these references along with musical examples from both works.

By claiming more firmly his influences from the canon of Western music, Reich started establishing his opus and biography within the same path.

In chapter two, “The Polyphony of Influence in Reich’s Career and Proverb,” I examine Proverb, a piece dedicated to Paul Hillier and inspired by Perotinus’s music. In

this chapter, I contextualize the influences of early music in Reich’s opus by drawing

from his writings, interviews, reviews, and other relevant secondary literature. I also

analyze the aesthetics of Proverb in comparison to those of Tehillim, as well as the

borrowing of Perotinus’s Viderunt Omnes, while shedding light on Reich’s musical

influences, canonic technique, and his relationship to music institutions and the early

music movement. In chapter two, I review Medieval and Renaissance influences in

Reich’s work. Through close readings, I examine the influences on Proverb and also

address Reich’s collaboration with Paul Hillier. This singer and conductor interprets early

music for Reich’s record company, ECM, as well as Reich’s music.66 I trace and observe

Hillier’s influence on Proverb along with Reich’s statements on early music. Referring to their collaboration, Reich wrote that the idea for Proverb was originally suggested by

66 It may not be a coincidence that Reich’s interest with Perotinus started growing when the composer began the collaboration with Paul Hillier who, in 1989, release the CD The Hilliard Ensemble: Perotin within the ECM Record New Series. This record company started publishing Reich’s music from 1978 on. Paul Hillier, The Hilliard Ensemble: Perotin, CD ECM New Series 1385 (837-75192), Munich; Steve Reich Ensemble, Music for 18 Musicians, CD/LP, ECM New Series 1129, 1978. Even though Paul Hillier often performs Reich’s music, his is a conductor of another ensemble that is (appropriately) called Ars Nova Copenhagen. In 2017, he premiered with this ensemble, Reich’s work Know What Is Above You, that is a vocal polyphonic composition with the accompaniment of the repeated drum rhythmical pattern. This piece draws from early organum and polyphonic style as Proverb.

Hillier with whom he shared an interest in the early period of Western music. Reich said

that he looked once again at the works of Perotinus for guidance and inspiration.67 Thus,

Proverb simulates early French organum, particularly through the use of canonic technique, drones, and specific vocal timbre. I demonstrate this through several music examples. In this chapter, I examine the ways through which Reich refers to Perotinus before Proverb. I also discuss some of the communicative gestures that show Proverb’s specific characteristics when compared to Reich’s early minimalist pieces, and the manner in which they were received by the audiences.

In the concluding chapter, the historiographical path is supported by research on the narratives around the composer’s life and work, writings on American minimalism and minimalism in general, Reich’s style, and means of self-promotion. Reich appropriated the contrapuntal technique of the canon and adapted it from the tape works up to Tehillim and Proverb. Reich approached this technique in his own manner, both through experiments and, later, through settings of familiar texts to music. In both works, the canonic technique is connected to elements of spirituality. These changes influenced

Reich’s narratives and aesthetics of his work and also led to the invention of new ways of listening to his music for his audiences.

67 Steve Reich, Proverb, Composer's Notes, accessed October 20, 2018: http://www.boosey.com/pages/cr/catalogue/cat_detail?musicid=557

CHAPTER 1

REICH, MINIMALIST SPIRITUALISM, AND BACH IN TEHILLIM

Bach was part of my wake-up call to find out who I was.68

Steve Reich

In the early 1980s, Steve Reich began to connect his compositions to Baroque,

Renaissance, and Medieval music in his writings and interviews. Reich’s fascination with

a Medieval sound ideal grew along with his interest in the Jewish musical tradition.

During the late 1970s, having established his own minimalist style and technique, Reich

turned to religion and Biblical cantillation studies in Israel. The influences of Judaism,

early sacred music, and spirituality, in general, are noticeable not only in Reich’s written

references to early music but also in his compositions from the 1980s, specifically

Tehillim (1981).

In this chapter, I examine Tehillim as a paradigmatic example of Reich’s change

of aesthetics and self-positioning as a minimalist composer starting in the 1980s. Reich’s

turn to Judaism and spirituality in Tehillim is reflected through a new treatment of voice

and text and, for the first time, Reich’s connection to music history and Bach’s sacred

music. For Reich, Western music goes far back to its Jewish cantillation origins. In 1995,

he stated: “My interest in Western music begins in synagogue chant, goes up to

68 Éric Darmon and Franck Mallet, “Steve Reich...,” op. cit.

Johann Sebastian Bach then jumps to Debussy, jazz, and the present.”69 Claiming his

Jewishness and placing Judaism in the Western musical tradition, Reich acknowledges

the long musical thread that he has inherited and that he follows.70

Along with his return to Judaism in the late 1970s, Reich’s music gained more

appreciation. Tehillim was commissioned by the South German Radio from Stuttgart, the

West German Radio from Cologne, and The Rothko Chapel from Houston, with the

support of Betty Freeman, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Memorial Foundation for

Jewish Culture.71 The work was premiered on September 16, 1982, by the New York

Philharmonic conducted by Zubin Mehta.72 Tehillim’s performance at the opening of the

concert season with one of the most prominent orchestras and conductors indicates that

his work in the early 1980s had begun to be accepted and favored. This was a stark

contrast to Reich’s initial reception in the early 1970s when his minimalist experimental

works sparked riots in concert halls. I discuss this further in chapter two.

Given that in this period Reich turned to religion and, in a broader sense, to

spirituality in his life and music, in this chapter I also shed light on the context of US and

European minimalism in the 1980s. I specifically address the concept of a “spiritual” or

“holy” minimalism that evolved in Europe with composers such as Pärt, Tavener, and

Gόrecki. Within this discourse, in this chapter, I reflect on Reich’s position as a

minimalist composer in the United States in the 1980s. In this period, Reich’s heritage as

69 Bruce Duffie, “Interview with Reich,” accessed February 14, 2019: http://www.bruceduffie.com/reich.html 70 Reich’s perception of Judaism as part of the Western culture can open many questions. One of them is the perception of Judaism in the US in the second half of the twentieth century, another important issue that could be discussed in further research. 71 Steve Reich, Tehillim, for voices and ensemble or chamber orchestra, Boosey & Hawkes, 1994. 72 Steve Reich, Writings on Music, op. cit., 104-5.

an American minimalist began to be acknowledged in the media and by many reputable

institutions in the United States, such as Carnegie Hall, and Deutsche Grammophon in

Europe. In this chapter, I examine the beginning of spiritual ideas in Reich’s music, his

Jewishness as a new layer of his identity, Tehillim as a reflection of that identity, and the

concept of “spiritual” minimalism. I argue that in Tehillim, as well as in his numerous

statements, interviews, and lectures, Reich began to position himself and his work more

closely within the canon of Western music.

I. Minimalism and “Spiritual” Minimalism

The reception and institutionalization of Reich’s work are best reflected through

minimalism, which is generally accepted as a 1960s movement in the United States.

Robert Schwarz, a music critic and an important scholar on Reich, described

“Minimalism” as a quintessentially “American invention” in the New York Times in

1991, stating that “ceaselessly kinetic, delighting in steady pulse and tonal center…

[minimalism] quickly became an international phenomenon, even though European

Minimalism ultimately developed a voice quite different from that of its American

progenitor.”73 This writing emphasizes the significance of the US minimalist movement in the 20th-century music in media as well as in scholarly writing.

Comparing US and European minimalist approaches, Schwarz argued that

“American minimalists”–La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich–

73 Robert K. Schwarz, “Classical Music; Foreign Twists on an American Style,” New York Times, May 5, 1991. Academic OneFile, accessed December 12, 2018: http://link.galegroup.com.access.library.miami.edu/apps/doc/A175261693/AONE?u=miami_richter&sid=A ONE&xid=9f1f7a12.

were “profoundly affected by their study of Indian ragas, African drumming, and

Balinese gamelan,” while Europeans “were only superficially influenced by non-Western

music. Eastern European composers like… [Arvo] Pärt and Henryk Gόrecki owe their

styles primarily to the purity of early music and the intense spirituality of local religious

and folk traditions.”74 Schwarz’s argument on the importance of non-Western music

influences in shaping and distinguishing US minimalism from other musics is significant

when considering the factors that impacted minimalist aesthetics. However, Schwarz

compared two different periods in the development of minimalism: one of the 1960s in the United States, and another of the mid-1970s in (mostly Eastern) Europe. However,

US (post)minimalists of the 1970s also appropriated other influences. Likewise, from the mid-1970s on, Reich began turning to the Western musical tradition, early music, spirituality, and Jewish cantillations.

On the one hand, Schwarz also argues that the term minimalism might not be adequate to describe some European composers. For example, he believes that Arvo

Pärt’s religious settings are neo-Medieval or neo-Renaissance rather than minimalist.

Schwarz concludes that even Pärt’s Fratres (1977), for violin and piano, is minimalistic only due to its repeated harmonic cycle, but that “its haunting expressive intensity leaves

Minimalism far behind.”75 This ambiguous approach to Eastern European minimalism

reflects just one of many concerns on what defines minimalism.76 However, by

emphasizing the importance of the US minimalist movement with a capital ‘M,’

Schwartz highlights his musical preferences. This standpoint begs the question: can a

74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 76 For more information, see Timothy A. Johnson, “Minimalism...,” op. cit.

religious setting of a piece make it non-minimalist? Or, in Reich’s case, can the religious

aspect make his music less ‘American’? If the religious setting of Pärt’s music makes it

non-minimalist according to Schwarz, how can one analyze Tehillim or Proverb? Reich’s music from the 1980s is connected to the work of these European composers through spirituality since Tehillim employs a religious theme, psalm text, and minimalist technique.

Musical minimalism in Europe from the 1970s shows the impact of certain

Eastern European composers on the formulation of a ‘subgenre’ often labeled “spiritual” minimalism, “mystic,” or “holy” minimalism.77 As already mentioned, spiritual

minimalists, particularly Pärt, were influenced by Medieval and Renaissance music as

well as religiousness. However, in 1989, Allan Kozinn questioned the initial assumption

that Pärt was a minimalist merely because of his use of “sacred texts… underscored by

the use of Renaissance harmonizations, Medieval melodic techniques, and even

Gregorian chant.”78 Paul Hillier presents similar doubts in his book about Arvo Pärt. He

connects certain elements of Pärt’s music to Western minimalism but notes that the

Eastern European composer focuses on Russian Orthodoxy.79 In his 1996 book

Minimalists, Robert Schwarz distinguishes Pärt as the only “spiritual” minimalist,

claiming that compositions (published in 1984), such as Fratres, Cantus in Memory of

Benjamin Britten, and Tabula Rasa, are the Eastern European offshoot of what he calls

American minimalism.80 Writing about Arvo Pärt’s minimalism, Paul Hillier emphasizes

77 David Dies, “Defining ‘Spiritual Minimalism’.” in Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, ed. Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll ap Siôn (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 321. 78 David Dies, “Defining ‘Spiritual...,” op. cit. 323. 79 Idem, 325. 80 Idem, 324.

the importance of modal formulae, plainchant, monody, and tintinnabuli harmony for the

stylistic prefix “spiritual.” Pärt’s music also characterizes a reductional melody.81

Similarly, US music critic Alex Ross observes Pärt and Gόrecki as both interested in explicit spirituality and religiousness, expressing their religious beliefs through music within a specific social and political discourse.82 Likewise, composer and theorist David

Dies defines the beginning of “spiritual” minimalism in 1976 with Pärt’s turn to

Medieval chordal sequences in instrumental works, especially short forms such as Pari

Intervallo, for organ, or Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, for strings and bells.

Dies believes that Pärt’s music possesses more of a liturgical than musical logic.

Although his music does have a certain musical logic, yet liturgical logic remains

undefined in both Pärt’s music and Dies’s writing. If themes and texts in one work define liturgical logic, Pärt’s mostly instrumental music would fit into that concept only through specific interpretations of musical narratives.

The rise in popularity of music by Henryk Górecki, Arvo Pärt, and John Tavener from the mid-1970s and 1980s onwards happened, as Dies believes, through the promotion and efforts of many people and organizations associated with Reich.83 ECM

published the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli and the Ukranian composer Valentin

81 Paul Hillier, Arvo Pärt, Oxford Studies of Composers (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) 82 Alex Ross, “Of Mystics, Minimalists and Musical Miasmas,” New York Times, Nov 5, 1993, 32. In a similar context, through concepts of “holy” minimalism and “spiritual transcendence,” Judy Lockhead writes about Sofia Gubaidulina’s Dancer on a Tightrope (1993) for violin and piano in relation to spirituality, postmodernism, and culture in the 1990s. Judy Lochhead, “Naming: music and the postmodern,” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, Postmodernism, Music and Cultural Theory, no. 66 (Winter 2008): 166. 83 Dies also suggests that after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, “people in the West had a sense of rediscovering and reconnecting with people who had been ‘lost’ for nearly half a century” and their music “demonstrated a desire to connect to cultural identities and religious traditions that had been suppressed or lost during these years.” David Dies, “Defining ‘Spiritual...,” op. cit., 320.

Silvestrov, and Nonesuch/Elektra Nonesuch promoted Górecki.84 The terms “spiritual”

and “holy” minimalism started to be used between 1984 and the late 1990s after an

increase of recordings and performances.85 Similarly, the collaboration with Paul Hillier

and ECM resulted in Reich’s quest for the “spiritual,” “early” music sound of Proverb.

In the musical sense, Dies finds Reich’s early minimalism different from Pärt’s primarily because of the distinctions between Medieval isorhythm in Pärt’s work and tape loops or African drumming in Reich’s work. Dies also finds similarities in the music of both composers; one of the most important commonalities is related to temporal stasis and the absence of organic musical development, which is “not dissimilar, and perhaps represent the most radical aspect of the music.”86 The element of stasis is common to both US and European minimalism, through drones, reduction of musical material, pulse,

and repetitiveness. Stasis is also present in their music through the influence of ancient

music, non-Western rhythms, or Medieval melodies.87 Reich’s pulses and rhythmic

repetitiveness offer a different approach to stasis. However, many of his pieces include a

drone accompaniment, much like the role of the string ensemble in Tehillim. Those

drones, as places of stasis, may connect Reich’s work to the minimalism of both East and

West.

84 Idem, 320-1. 85 One such example is the Elektra Nonesuch release Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, Volume 1 and 2, from 1987 and 1989, performed by the Bulgarian women’s folk choir. The first volume entered Billboard’s Top 200 popular music charts, and the second volume won a Grammy award. Dies thinks that “these two albums set the stage for a surge in ‘spiritual’ minimalism by affirming a Western pre-Soviet construction of ‘the East’ as exotic” and that these albums offered a sonic identity of Eastern Europe that aligned with Belá Bartók’s (pre-Soviet) presentation of that world that has many parallel dissonances and irregular meters. Ibid. 86 Ibid. 87 Idem, 332.

In one of the first chapters on musical minimalism in his book Experimental

Music, composer and scholar Michael Nyman argued that the origins of (American, i.e.,

US) minimalism lay in serialism and, especially, in the tendency of Anton Webern’s

music to repeat pitches at the same octave positions throughout a section of a movement.

According to Nyman, the variation process of Webern’s music was heard by some

composers (Christian Wolff and Young in particular) as stasis. Minimalists also found

musical stasis outside of the Western tradition: in Ghanaian drumming, Indian ragas, and

Balinese music.88 However, the state of stasis in music which lacks a climax and

directionality is also part of the early Western classical tradition; we find it in chants,

organa, and music by composers such as Perotinus and Machaut. Repetitiveness and

stasis are some of the music components that make minimalism similar to some of the

non-Western musics.89 La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass,

have been canonized by many writers as the main (and only) minimalists of an original

American musical tradition. However, recent research has revealed certain figures that

collaborated and worked at the same time with similar musical means of expression,

including Terry Jennings. Brett Boutwell believes that Jennings’ work between 1958 and

1966 strongly intersects with the music of the famous representatives of minimalism.90

In addition, Schwartz claims that there is an element that Western European

composers, such as Louis Andriessen and Michael Nyman, and US minimalists, Glass

and Reich, share: their “attitude that deletes boundaries between ‘serious’ from ‘popular’

88 Michael Nyman, Experimental Music, op. cit., 139. 89 Nyman described features of Ghanaian and Balinese music as Eastern musical systems. Ibid. 90 Brett Boutwell, “Terry Jennings, the Lost Minimalist,” American Music 32, 1 (Spring 2014): 82- 107, 99.

[music].”91 All four of the composers above use popular Western culture and music.

Reich also has incorporated many non-typical classical music elements in his works. For

example, in Radio Rewrite (2012) Reich directly cites songs by the British rock band

Radiohead, and Electric Counterpoint (1987) is dedicated to and was premiered by the

jazz guitarist Pat Metheny. References to ‘popular’ sounds made Reich’s music more

accessible and acceptable to a broader audience.92

For Reich, however, his turn to Judaism and spirituality in Tehillim happened through the West, since the composer claimed it to be an ancient Western tradition but with specific musical features, primarily irregular meter and accentuation of the text in shifts of two and three beats.93 Tehillim also draws from sacred sources (psalm text and

Bach’s sacred cantata). It coincides with the rise of popularity of Eastern European

minimalist music and its topics, and it may also be related to the communication and

reconnection, as Dies suggests, of people of the West with people from Eastern Europe.

Analyzing Reich’s role in the general context of minimalism in America in the 1970s as well as Eastern Europe helps us understand why Reich uses religious elements within his minimalist musical approach.

II. Reich’s Jewish identity and Tehillim

Reich’s turn to Judaism in the 1970s exerted a big influence on his music. In this period, Reich studied Biblical Hebrew, Torah, and Jewish cantillations at the Lincoln

91 Robert K. Schwarz, “Classical Music...,” op. cit. 92 For example, in 1999, Nonesuch records released a record with Reich’s music remixed by popular DJs. https://www.nonesuch.com/albums/reich-remixed 93 Reich claims that ta’amim of Jewish cantillation “form the historical basis for Gregorian Chant and thus stand at the earliest period in Western musical history.” Steve Reich, Writings on Music, op. cit. 113.

Square Synagogue in New York City.94 He later traveled to Israel where he researched

Jewish cantillation of several non-Ashkenazi communities, the ancient Psalmic prosody,

and the modern Hebrew accent.95 The first time the composer incorporated this

knowledge, experience, and a Hebrew psalm text into his music was in the 1981 piece

Tehillim.96

Reich admits that the study of West African and Balinese music awakened his

interest in his ethnic cultural background, stating that, “People raised in the 1950s and

‘60s, like myself, often felt [that]… there was no ethnic underpinning. I simply had to

discover where I came from, which was very satisfying and allowed me to learn things

about Judaism that have become very important in my life.”97 It seems that this quest for

his identity was initiated by an exploration of Jewish musical traditions. This has also

become an important element in his music, aesthetics, and approach to text choice and

setting.

Reich grew up listening to the Hebrew language and was exposed to Judaism in

his family (his father’s parents were Jewish immigrants from Krakow and Budapest).98

However, it is not clear to what extent Reich was involved in Jewish religious practices;

94 Ibid. 95 Steve Reich, “Tehillim (1981),” and “Hebrew Cantillation as an Influence on Composition (1982),” Writings on Music 1965–2000, op. cit. 100-118. 96 Tehillim is one of several compositions in the 20th century dedicated to or inspired by psalms in Western classical music. One of the most famous is Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms (1930) for orchestra and chorus dedicated to the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Stravinsky used Latin translations of Psalm 38, 39, and 150. 97 In the 1996 interview, Reich stated: “Tehillim is perhaps the most conventional of my pieces; I think it’s also one of my best. It takes parts of the psalms, a classical Western text, in the original Hebrew and uses an ensemble of traditional instruments and singers who sing the text in a very straightforward way, although it’s complex rhythmically.” Jonathan Cott, „Interview with Steve Reich,” New York 1996, accessed February 20, 2019: http://www.stevereich.com/articles/Jonathan_Cott_interview.html 98 Antonella Puca, “Steve Reich and Hebrew Cantillation.” The Musical Quarterly 81, no. 4 (1997): 537-55, 538.

but an overt exploration on his part into this tradition took place in his late thirties.

Reich’s first trip to Israel was with his wife Beryl Korot in 1977 to research biblical

cantillations, and then further fieldwork in Baghdad, Yemen, Kurdistan, and India.

Reich’s research trip ended in 1978 and, soon after, in 1979, Reich composed Octet.

According to Puca, in Octet Reich tried to apply the structure of Jewish chants that he

had heard in all places he visited.99

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Jewishness in the US had a strong impact on Reich’s

life and career and also on US society as a whole. Reich’s statements that Western

tradition comes from Jewish tradition coincide with a general view of Judeo-Christianity

as a concept related to the idea of Western democratic religious values that included

Jews. Judeo-Christianity does not represent one religion, but one religious reality or a phrase for the tradition in which US Catholics would acknowledge the Jewish roots of

Christianity after World War II.100 Also, this idea has been present in art, music, and

especially in conservative political leaders’ rhetoric on their fight against communism

and antisemitism in the United States.101

Mark Silk argues that the theological discussions had little effect on the popularity

of “the Judeo-Christian tradition.”102 Jonathan Sarna also argues that “Judeo-Christianity”

as a term became popular after World War II with the efforts of interfaith organizations.

Discussing the mid-20th-century context as the beginning of this concept, Sarna believes

that “in the face of the worldwide antisemitic efforts to stigmatize and destroy Judaism,

99 Namely, Reich concluded that the structure of the chant is always the same. Idem, 539. 100 Mark Silk, “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America,” American Quarterly 36, 1 (Spring, 1984), 65-85, 75-7 101 Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History, Yale University Press, 2004, 267. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/miami/detail.action?docID=3420022 102 Mark Silk, “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America,”op. cit., 79.

influential Christians and Jews in America labored to uphold it, pushing Judaism from the

margins of American religious life toward its very center.”103 One of the factors that contributed to the acceptance of Judaism is the “tripartite scheme.” In 1955, one of the

Jewish proponents of Jewish-Christian Hebraism, Will Herberg, included Judaism as one of three important US religions in the scheme “Protestant-Catholic-Jew.” Therefore, from the 1950s onwards, Jews began to be positioned differently in US society.104

Similarly, Silk states that Judeo-Christian concepts arose in the United States in a

search for consensus after the 1960s. He also agrees with Nathan Rotenstreich’s opinion

that Judeo-Christian civilization was “a ‘device’ to convince gentiles that they shared a

common tradition with the Jews, and to convince Jews that they partook not only of the

universal secular culture but of the universal Christian one as well.”105 Relying on Robert

Gordis’s discussion of this tradition in 1966, Silk summarizes three sociopolitical factors

that may have caused the coinage of this phrase: the growth of the interfaith movement

after World War I, fear of communism during the depression, and the rise of a pluralist ethic after World War II.106 From the 1970s onwards, Silk states that “America experienced a new enthusiasm for ethnic particularism; Jews, accepted as never before in

103 Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History, op. cit, 267. 104 Ibid, xv. Jewish population in the United States have declined in the last several decades. Jonathan Sarna argues, based on many sociological and demographical research, that Jewish population was the biggest in the 1940s; they constituted 3.7 percent of the population. However, at the turn of the century, Jews formed less than two percent of the United States population. Similarly, this author also notices the decline in Jewish immigration in the late 1990s given primarily the collapse of communism which between 1970 and 1990 caused more than 200,000 immigrants. Of course, the matter of Judaism and its meaning in lives of these Jews is another issue worth discussing. Ibid, 357-361. 105 Nathan Rotenstreich, professor of philosophy and former rector of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem wrote on this issue in 1973. Mark Silk, “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America,” op. cit., 83. 106 Ibid, 79-80.

American society, were expected to cultivate some distinctiveness. The protection of

"Judeo-Christian" became superfluous.”107

The developments in Jewish music in the 1960s and 1970s responded to political

events as well as changes in US culture.108 Since the 1970s, many composers began

including Biblical and other Hebrew texts into their music, often finding inspiration in

cantillation. Besides Steve Reich’s Tehillim, which is based on the Book of Psalms, some other composers who refer to Judaism are Sam Adler, Bruce Adolphe, Michael Isaacson,

Louis Karchin, David Lefkowitz, Michael Rose, Morris Rosenzweig, and Bruce Roter.109

In the general climate of Judeo-Christianity in US society of the 1970s, Reich could more easily express his religious affiliation. Reich’s view of Jewish cantillation as a type of early Western music or, in a broad sense, his intention to make Judaism into a Western tradition, corresponds with the Judeo-Christian climate in the country. Namely, in

Tehillim, Reich connects Hebrew text as the element of Judaism and his Jewish identity and Bach’s quote from the Protestant choral cantata as the element of Christian and classical musical tradition.

In this regard, Reich carefully chose psalms so that he could cater to both Jewish and non-Jewish persons.110 Describing the process of composing Tehillim in 2000, Reich

stated: “I was looking at the Hebrew [text], just saying it and improvising with this little

107 Ibid, 83. 108 Mark Klingman, “Contemporary Jewish Music in America,” The American Jewish Year Book 101 (2001): 88-141, 104. Mark Klingman argues that “the Israeli military victory in the Six-Day War in 1967 engendered great Jewish pride, inspiring many young Jews to look more closely into the Jewish tradition. America, at the time, was a hospitable place for the recovery of one’s cultural roots since the older melting-pot model of acculturation had been replaced by emphasis on ethnic pride, largely as a result of the black-power movement and the rising consciousness of white ethnic groups.” 109 Ibid. 88-141, 136-7. Klingman adds that “recognized artists of mainstream classical and popular music have also recorded Jewish music: the name recognition of the artists plus the fact that the albums are sold at commercial chain retail generally ensure high sales.” Ibid. 110Steve Reich, Writings on Music 1965–2000, op. cit., 217.

drum, and out came the melody, just the way it has for composers for centuries…not only

did the words come out with a melody, but the 12–123–12–123 rhythmic groups …”111

Reich described this compositional process in Tehillim as an intuitive response to the

Hebrew Psalm text rather than as an intellectual process.112 Not only in 2000, but from

the 1980s on, Reich began pointing out the importance of Judaism in his life and music.

If the turn to his religion caused changes in Tehillim aesthetics, then one may consider

Judaism as a significant impact on Reich’s whole opus because the homogeneous

approach to music and text in Tehillim inspired Reich to use the same rhythmic patterns

and changes in meter in the compositions that followed. The first composition after

Tehillim with similar components was The Desert Music (1983), and later Proverb.

Making a clear reference to the Jewish tradition for the first time through psalm

text in Hebrew is one of the repercussions of Reich’s constructed Jewish identity that

distinguishes Tehillim from his earlier works. The title is a Hebrew word for psalms that

derives from the three letter Hebrew root ‘hey, lamed, lamed’ (hll), which is also the root

of ‘halleluyah.’113 In Tehillim, Reich sets Psalms 19:2-5 (19:1-4 in Christian translations),

34:13-15 (34:12-14 in Christian translations), 18:26-27 (18:25-26 in Christian

translations) and 150:4-6 (Example 1.1). A major factor for Reich in choosing to set

psalms was that

as opposed to the cantillation of the Torah and Prophets, which is a living 2,500-year-old oral tradition throughout the synagogues of the world, the oral tradition for psalm singing in the Western synagogues has been lost. This meant I was free to compose the melodies for Tehillim without a living oral tradition to imitate or ignore.”114

111 Ibid. 112 Ibid. 113 Steve Reich, Tehillim...,”, op. cit., note of the composer. 114 Reich supports his statement with Dr. Avigdor Herzog notes in the Encyclopedia Judaica. Steve Reich, Writings on Music, op. cit., 115-8.

Since chanting of the Scriptum is at the center of the Jewish tradition, according to

musicologist Antonella Puca, Reich tried to preserve it as an aspect of his identity as

well.115 In the context of the relationship between music and words in his opus, Reich

stated: “For the first time, the music had to serve the purpose of the meaning of the

words.”116 In Tehillim, as per the Jewish tradition, the clarity of the text becomes the primary aspect of music that Reich tries to retain in his own work.

Example 1.1: Text in Tehillim

Part I, fast movement, Psalm 19:2-5, “Hashamyim mehsapehreem Kavohd Kail”

(“The heavens declare the glory of God”)

Part II, fast movement, Psalm 34:13-15, “Mihaeesh heychahfaytz chahyeem”

(“Who is the man that desires life”)

Part III, slow movement, Psalm 18:26-27, “Imchahsid, titchahsahd”

(“With the merciful You are merciful”)

Part IV, fast movement, Psalm 150:4-6, “Halleluhu batof umachol”

(“Praise Him with drum and dance”)

The treatment of voice in Tehillim became the most audible feature of Reich’s aesthetics.

It greatly affected his treatment of the melody and rhythm. In works composed during the

1960s, Reich treated vocal parts quite differently. Reich connected the words of a

recorded speech on an electronic tape with its melody to create electronic processes. In

115 Antonella Puca, “Steve Reich...,” op. cit., 539, 545. 116 Idem, 545.

37 the first well-known piece that includes a vocal part, It's Gonna Rain (1965), Reich recorded a speech of a Pentecostal preacher in San Francisco. The sample included sounds of a pigeon and traffic in the background. Playing this sample on nonsynchronous tape loops led to phase shifting processes and electronic manipulation of the voice-in- time in a sort of, what Reich calls, micro canon.117 In the 1970s, starting with Drumming

and continuing with Music for Eighteen Musicians (the two vocal-instrumental works),

voices did not have a particular text but were rather singing individual words or syllables, often as the resulting patterns of instrumental parts. 118

By engaging with the biblical Hebrew text in Tehillim, Reich tried to keep the meaning of the words, including their sonic features, particularly intonation and metric accentuation.119 The significance of the text from the Script led Reich to use long melodic-rhythmic phrases that are not typical in his earlier works. The rhythm emerges from the rhythm of the text, as well as the meter, which is in successive units of two and

117 Drawing from Western classical musical tradition, Reich started mentioning micro canon instead of phase shifting technique of his early works in his interviews from the 2000s on: “with Bela Bartόk I learned about the modes and canons from his Mikrokosmos. As you may know, canons are the backbone of almost everything I've done. Phasing is merely a small variation on canonic technique where the subject is usually short and the rhythmic distance between voices is constantly, slowly, changing.” „Questions from Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker & Answers from Steve Reich,” https://www.stevereich.com/articles/Anne_Teresa_de_Keersmaeker_intervies.html. 118 At this time, Reich started employing the human voice to a much greater extent in his music. On Reich’s official website, one can find summarized influences and institutions that supported Reich’s interest in (non-)Western music: “During the summer of 1970, with the help of a grant from the Institute for International Education, Mr. Reich studied drumming at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Ghana in Accra. In 1973 and 1974 he studied Balinese Gamelan Semar Pegulingan and Gamelan Gambang at the American Society for Eastern Arts in Seattle and Berkeley, California. From 1976 to 1977 he studied the traditional forms of cantillation (chanting) of the Hebrew scriptures in New York and Jerusalem.” Steve Reich, official website: https://www.stevereich.com/. In the 1970s, Reich composed vocal-instrumental pieces where voices would either sing resulting melodic patterns of the ensemble or vocally imitate instrumental colors. Those are: Drumming (1970-71), Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organs (1973), Music for Eighteen Musicians (1974-76), Music for a Large Ensemble (1978). 119 Antonella Puca argues that these are some of the aspects Reich tried to incorporate in Tehillim. She also includes timbre, melodic cadences, and sound aspects of spoken language as elements that would preserve the semantic meaning of the words which as, according to her, Reich’s central concern. Ibid.

three eight-notes (Example 1.2). The vocal part, thus, becomes prominent when

compared to the instrumental parts in the ensemble that mostly double the vocal part or

sustain the drone. Despite the contrapuntal structure, Tehillim possesses hymn-like elements in which the vocal parts are very prominent when accompanied by instruments.

The melody is dominant, the winds accompany the melody, the percussions provide the

exact pulse and sense of meter, and the other instruments maintain a drone

accompaniment (Example 1.2).

Example 1.2: The opening of Tehillim, female voice section, section A, mm. 1- 30120

120 Steve Reich, Tehillim..., op. cit.

Example 1.3: The beginning of section D in Tehillim, Part I, with clarinet doubling of vocal parts and drones in the string sections121

121 Ibid.

Reich often stated that his intention was not to recreate psalm singing. His aesthetics in

Tehillim became quite the modification to the compositional principles of his early

work.122 Schwarz believes that Reich’s concern with creating an appropriate setting of the psalms in Tehillim impacted his musical aesthetics.123 The choice of text impacted

Reich’s melodic phrases, which incorporated imitation and also became longer as compared to his earlier works. This also led to. Other features of Tehillim that indicate the aesthetic change are the constant shifts of meter, contrasting tempos, repetition in the manner of its traditional use in Western music, new timbre with new percussive instruments in Reich’s ensemble—a small tuned tambourine without jingles and crotales

(antique cymbals).124

Tehillim shows Reich’s renewed interest in classical and Baroque music because

it includes the canonic technique, a single theme for each movement, motoric rhythm,

tonal harmonic vocabulary, and extended melodies in imitative counterpoint. In this

regard, Schwarz argues that, in Part One of Tehillim, “each verse of the psalms is

conceived as an independent canon with the metrical position between the voices varying

from verse to verse,” connecting it to early works “due to its utilization of multiple

canonic lines which are all at the same pitch level.”125 Tehillim steps into a more

traditional territory of canon when compared to Reich’s contrapuntal combination of

122 Reich states: “…when other people listen to that, they feel a persona present. So when that begins to spread and multiply and come apart as it does in Its’ Gonna Rain, there’s a very strong identification of a human being going through this uncommon magic. This is why in the late 1980s, just after my involvement with the orchestra in a piece like The Four Sections, I felt I needed to get back in contact with those early works. There was something important there and I couldn’t let it go. Documentary reality still had material to be mined. And Different Trains was the first result of my return to documentary material, and then The Cave and City Life.” Interview with Jonathan Cott, op. cit., 123 Robert Schwarz, “Steve Reich: Music as a Gradual Process Part II.” Perspectives of New Music 20, no. 1/2 (1981): 264-7 124 Ibid. 125 Schwarz, “Music as a Gradual Process II,” op. cit., 265-6

41 voices in early works through the technique that he first called phase shifting processes.

Later, in his interviews from 2000 on, Reich started explicitly referring to his phase

shifting early works as ‘micro’ canons in unison. Although in the texts from the 1980s

published in Writings on Music in 2004 Reich mentioned the influence of canon in his

opus, he began using the term ‘micro’ canon after the book was published.126 Although very recent as a term, this idea of the canon in unison in Reich’s opinion goes back to

1965 and It’s Gonna Rain.127

Furthermore, Reich connected Jewish cantillations with Western European classical music by claiming that the musical system of the Western tradition of

cantillation has the same basis as the European tonal system.128 The harmonic aspects of

Reich’s work that Schwarz presents is one of the components that links Reich’s music closer to Western influences.129 In Tehillim, Reich connects its harmonic vocabulary and a variety of contrasting textures and timbres “drawn more deeply from the well of

Western tradition than any previous Reich composition.”130 Tehillim contrasts with

126 In the interview from July 2002 Reich stated that: “basically, the idea of close union canons crop up to this day.” On canons, he stated “That’s Johann Sebastian Bach, that’s Bartók … that’s 85 percent of everything I’ve ever written.” Gabrielle Zuckerman, “Interview with Steve Reich,” op. cit. 127 ABC Arts. “Steve Reich - Rhythm and Minimalism.” (Published on 6 May 2012), accessed October 7, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFS8Ru27rqs 18:50-19:30 128 This system excludes the use of microtonality associated to the Jewish community cantillations of the Middle East. Antonella Puca, “Steve Reich...,” op. cit., 543. The presence of tonality in Reich’s work, Jonathan Bernard observes as generally “harmonic” but not in a sense of a common-practice tonality. Jonathan W. Bernard, “Minimalism, Postminimalism, and the Resurgence of Tonality…” op. cit. 127. 129 In Writings on Music on Tehillim, Reich writes: “The use of extended melodies, imitative counterpoint functional harmony and full orchestration may well suggest a renewed interest in Classical or, more accurately, Baroque and earlier Western musical practice. The non-vibrato, non-operatic vocal production will also remind listeners of Western music prior to 1750.” Steve Reich, “Tehillim...,” op. cit., pages unknown. 130 Schwarz, “Music as a Gradual Process II,” op. cit., 267. In his analysis of Tehillim, Schwarz adds: “The basic harmonic technique of Tehillim harks back to that which we first observed in Music for Eighteen Musicians: a chordal cycle, established near the outset of a section, undergoes subsequent permutations which consist chiefly of altering the bass line, while the middle and upper registers remain fairly constant.” Idem, 264.

Reich’s earlier works, but it also helps a composer to establish a closer connection with

the Western musical tradition.

As in previous compositions by Reich, repetition is also present in Tehillim.

Although stating that repetition can be used in a potentially infinite variety of ways,

Richard Middleton distinguishes two basic types of repetition in music from the 1980s: musematic repetition and discursive repetition.131 Middleton defines musematic repetition

as “the repetition of short units; the most immediately familiar examples - riffs - are

found in Afro-American musics and in rock,” while discursive repetition “is the

repetition of longer units, at the level of the phrase (defined as a unit roughly equivalent

to a verbal clause or short sentence, not too long to be apprehended 'in the present'…), the

sentence or even the complete section.”132

In Reich’s music, one would expect a musematic type of repetition that would make the piece closer to US minimalist and African music. However, Tehillim is quite different from the majority of Reich’s works because of the pattern of repetition it follows. Namely, the melody consists of long textual phrases that are closer to

Middleton’s idea of discursive repetition (Example 1.2, the whole segment repeats after this long melodic and textual segment finishes). Although those phrases do repeat, Reich claims that he was avoiding repetition in this piece because he needed to set the text by its rhythm and its meaning.133 The rhythm follows the flux of words and text setting in

developed melodies, fast tempos, and drum accompaniment.

131 He takes the term 'museme' in analogy to the linguists' 'morpheme', and Tagg’s idea of a 'minimal unit of expression'. Richard Middleton, “‘Play It Again Sam’: Some Notes on the Productivity of Repetition in Popular Music,“ Popular Music, 3, Producers and Markets (1983): 235-270, 238. 132 Ibid. 133 Steve Reich, “Tehillim,” Writings on Music, op. cit.

III. Tehillim and Bach

Reich’s narratives on Tehillim always include Bach as one of his influences. The composer’s return to Bach in the 1980s and Perotinus in the 1990s, specifically their sacred works, adds to Reich’s poetical statements.134 Reich’s constant practice of

describing and analyzing his own music contributes to his presentation of his work in

public.135 Musical reference to Bach’s music in Tehillim is primarily reflected in the doubling technique that Reich implements between clarinet(s) and voice(s) in Part I of

Tehillim. At the beginning of Part II, Reich suddenly changes the clarinets form Part I to

Oboe and Horn. Such orchestration is, in Reich’s opinion, a direct reference to Bach’s

choral cantata Christ Lag in Todes Banden BWV 4.136 Such a reference in Tehillim

relates only to the compositional technique. (Example 1.4). Although the technique of

doubling voices and instruments is not only common to Bach’s music, Reich potentiates

this particular work as a reference.

134 Reich stated: “Tehillim is a piece where I consulted Bach directly…” Darmon, Éric, Franck, Mallet. “Steve Reich...,” op. cit., 33:20. 135 In Writings on Music, Reich provides a very ‘dry’ explanation on structure, instrumentation, and techniques in Tehillim. Reich’s intention to keep an objective view of music to the score reader differs from his talks about connections between Tehillim and religion. Ibid. 136 Ibid. Another source of the same video: “Reich on Tehillim + Bach,” published April 21, 2014, accessed February 19, 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=creTXfBzjBg

Example 1.4: The beginning of Part II in Tehillim, horn and oboe doubling voices, mm.

1-4.137

Another reference that Reich claims from Bach as “a direct musical steal… from the

best”138 is located at the beginning of Part III. Although the imitative technique is the

same, it is not a direct citation from Bach’s second verse Aria Duetto of Cantata No. 4,

(Example 1.5). Reich’s inverts Bach’s vocal melody, composing an ascending, instead of

descending, half-step and adds a note for the third syllable of words “Imchahseed” and

“Titchahsahd” (descending a perfect fourth). Reich composes a new melody. Bach’s

motif, if transformed, becomes unrecognizable. Metrical position and melodic

continuation of the phrase are also different when compared to Bach’s music.

137 Steve Reich, Tehillim..., op. cit. 138 Ibid.

Example 1.5: Comparison between Bach’s and Reich’s imitative melodies

a) The beginning of Bach’s Aria Duetto of Cantata No. 4139

b) The beginning of Part III in Reich’s Tehillim140

Describing Tehillim, Reich claimed that it “moves to a more traditional territory” in comparison to his earlier work.141 The instrumentation consists of piccolo, flute, oboe, two clarinets, horn in A, six percussionists (that are the only un-amplified instruments)— maracas, clapping hands, four tuned tambourines without jingles, marimba, vibraphone,

crotales—two electric organs, strings (two violins, viola, cello, and bass), and four

139 Johann Sebastian Bach, Christ Lag in Todes Banden (Cantata BWV 4), ed. Moritz Hauptmann (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1851). 140 Steve Reich, Tehillim..., op. cit. 141 Ibid.

women’s voices (one high soprano, two lyric sopranos, and one alto). The

instrumentation does not include electronics unless it is an orchestral setting. The orchestral version of the piece has a full string and wind sections while voices are amplified.

By referring to early music technique and Judaism in his writings, Reich tried to underline the importance of his work. When commenting on his return to Western music origins, Reich said that his contrapuntal pieces are “bringing music full circle, back to where it started,” and that “music started long before J. S. Bach, long before Gregorian chant, and long before synagogue chant.”142 Reich’s turn to Bach and Western classical

music made Tehillim, in his opinion, a more traditional Western piece of music.143

Claiming to quote Bach seems like a necessity for Reich to add the significance of his own narrative and step into the Western canon. For Reich, referring to Bach and Tehillim were “one step forward, two steps back” but, at the same time, something new.144

Reich’s placement of Jewish cantillation in the Western tradition broadens his idea of Western music to a time prior to the Medieval period. As previously mentioned,

Reich’s relationship to his Jewish identity evolved throughout his career. Since Judaism

was only one aspect of his spirituality, he turned to sacred music in a wider context in his

opus from the 1980s. In a 1995 interview, Reich spoke about his vision of music, its

future, and purpose by paraphrasing Bach, stating that “the purpose of music was to the

glory of God, and to refresh the spirits of music lovers.”145 Referencing Bach’s

142 Steve Reich, Writings on Music, op. cit., 104. 143 Ibid. 144 Ibid. 145 Bruce Duffie, op. cit.

(Christian) thoughts, Reich alludes not only to his own religiousness but also to the

relationship he wants to establish with his music in music history.

Tehillim represents a turning point in Reich’s poetics in which the composer, for the first time, draws inspiration from his religious identity and Bach, sets a text for the first time, uses ‘early music’ vocal technique, writes long melodies, and paves the way towards (sacred) Medieval musical references in his music by quoting Perotinus in

Proverb. Reich uses Biblical text, specifically Psalm 150 for the last movement of

Tehillim, “Halleluijah,” in which he refers to a famous piece from the Western music

canon with the same text, Handel’s Messiah. From the harmonic aspect, another allusion to Handel’s work is the final key of Tehillim where the last movement modulates from D minor to the festive ending of the movement in D major.146 Reich refers to the musical

past not only to gain a similar sound but also to make “a mixture of old and new” and

relate to traditional Western musical practices.147

Tehillim has a strong connection between words and music; it preserves the flux

of Hebrew psalm text.148 This is one of the changes in Reich’s aesthetics that is followed

by changes in his reception in the 1980s. Using voices trained in early music

performance, rather than voices that sing operatically, connects Tehillim, and some of

146 Reich mutates in the fourth and final part of Tehillim from d minor to D major. 147 Steve Reich, Writings on Music, 104. Reich stated: “I think you can learn from your betters, and he is certainly the top of the list.” In Tehillim, I listened a lot to Christ lag in Todesbanden, and just became keenly aware of the character. He uses the tromba, a kind of Baroque brass wooden instrument to double the voice, which gives it a certain quality. That led to my considering that in the first part of Tehillim it would be a clarinet double, and then the second section it would immediately switch to double the oboe and English horn doubling the voices, which changes the character of the voice, even though it is the same singers.“ Bruce Duffie, op. cit., 148 Such an approach to words may arguably categorize them as musical documentaries. For example, the documentary aspect of The Cave, one finds in Reich recording of Israeli Jews from West Jerusalem for the (music) material of the first act; or his field recordings of Palestinian Muslims in East Jerusalem in the second act; or, in the third act of the opera, in the composer’s montage of statements by Americans from New York City and Texas.

Reich’s later works, to the early music movement and performers of early music.149 This

relationship follows from a dry singing style without vibrato that is considered by proponents of the early music movement as historically authentic.150

Non-vibrato singing in Tehillim reflects Reich’s connection to Baroque music and

his a homage to Bach. It is an aesthetic feature that is a symbol of Reich’s musical

threshold in which he turns to spirituality and Perotinus’s early sacred music. Given

Reich’s statement that Bach was a part of his “wake-up call” to find out who he was,151

Tehillim was a turning point for Reich in many aspects and the moment when he started claiming Bach’s influence.

After more than two decades of composing, in the 1980s Reich continued to gradually change both his aesthetics and his approach to his influences. From this period onwards, the most evident trace of Reich’s new compositional principles is his treatment of vocal

parts. The connection to his religious tradition and the compositional principles he

explored in Tehillim led Reich to further use a similar combination of voices and

instruments in his later works, including Proverb. He began setting text to music and

engaging again with a recorded speech in instrumental music.152 In particular,

149 Reich prefers early music voices also because they are more able to accurately perform rhythm along with the necessary agility for his music. Éric Darmon and Franck Mallet, “Steve Reich...,” op. cit. 150 The ‘spirituality’ of such performance connects Reich’s music to the music of the European and Baltic composers of ‘spiritual’ minimalism, as well as with the Hilliard Ensemble and Paul Hillier. The Hilliard Ensemble, in collaboration with ECM records, published several recordings of ‘spiritual’ minimalists, specifically Pärt. From the 1990s, they collaborated with Reich at many of his performances, as well as on Proverb, as already mentioned in chapter one. Some of the recordings are: The Hilliard Ensemble, Staatsorchester Stuttgart Brass Ensemble and Dennis Russell Davies, Arbos, ECM 1325, 1987; Passio, ECM 1370, 1988; Miserere, ECM 1430, 1991; The Hilliard Ensemble and Alexei Lubimov, Lamentate, ECM 1930, 2005. 151 Éric Darmon and Franck Mallet, “Steve Reich...,” op. cit. 152 For example, in The Desert Music in 1983, Reich used text by an American poet William Carlos Williams.

instrumental music in Different Trains (1988) and The Cave (1993) comes from the

melody and rhythm of spoken words. Both works draw from Reich’s new approach to

text and melody, especially from the importance of text in shaping the melody. In both

works, Reich returns to recorded voices, but combines them with musical instruments and

sets vocal patterns in the instrumental ensemble.

Furthermore, both Tehillim and Proverb share the same postminimalist compositional approach. Postminimalist elements in these works are based on the clear textural distinction of vocal parts accompanied by other instruments. This distinction in

Tehillim is also timbral because Reich employs voices, winds, and strings in three different layers of sound as well as texture; voices sing the main melody, winds double voices, and strings usually hold drones. Tehillim and, later, Proverb include minimalist repetitiveness, but both pieces have this textural hierarchy. Such hierarchy of musical parts is not typical for minimalist works, but rather postminimalist pieces.153 Discussing

Proverb further, I explore its postminimalist elements and communicative gestures in

chapter two. Proverb represents another layer of spirituality in Reich’s music that is not

directly related to his religious affiliation, like in Tehillim, but rather musical aspirations

towards early music sound ideals. However, Proverb represents an extension of

aesthetics explored and established in Tehillim.

153 Marija Masnikosa, “A Theoretical Model...,” op. cit., 297-314, 306.

CHAPTER 2

THE POLYPHONY OF INFLUENCE IN REICH’S CAREER AND PROVERB

Continuing with similar stylistic elements, the aesthetics Reich explored in

Tehillim (1981) were also extended to Proverb (1995). Proverb also reflects Reich’s intentions to connect his use of compositional techniques with early music, as well as his collaboration with the early music movement performers. This connection is evident through the employment of canonic technique through long imitative melodic themes and references to Perotinus’s Viderunt Omnes and other organa. By referring to Medieval music, a lesser-known repertory in the Western music canon, Reich attempts to present his work as distinctive from his contemporaries and associate himself with the works of early music counterpoint masters.

Proverb is aesthetically different from Reich’s 1960s and early 1970s pieces

because it communicates with the audience using different expressive means.154 Proverb includes rhetorical elements that make it distinct from his (non-narrative) minimalist works. Although Proverb is based on minimalist techniques, Reich also employs non- minimalist means of expression, such as vocal timbre that refers to early music, canonical imitation between voices, and setting of a philosophical text. Through a reading of

Proverb, in this chapter I deal with the nuances of Reich’s compositional style corresponding to aspects of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque polyphony and counterpoint, such as long-held drones, isorhythm, metrical neutrality of voices,

154 Despite a clear connection of this work with spiritual music through the references to organum, it does not belong to spiritual minimalism that started in the mid-1970s in Eastern Europe.

imitation, timbre, and references to Perotinus. Therefore, I investigate Reich’s reference

to Perotinus’s style and the way it echoes the rhetoric and meaning in Proverb. In the

broader context, these concerns are intertwined with the interpretation of Proverb by

Ronald Woodley, a musicologist who specializes in the 15th-century music theory, and

his analysis of text in Proverb. Reich draws the canonical technique in this piece, along

with timbre, melody, rhythms, and repetitiveness as some of the compositional elements

from early music historical performances.155 In the analytical part of this chapter, I also

underscore the possible interpretations of the meaning of Wittgenstein's text in this piece.

The philosopher’s proverb in its brevity reflects Reich’s ideas as a minimalist composer.

Reich reached these new elements of his compositional approach after taking a long path

in researching, experimenting, and performing different musics.

I. Influences in Reich’s Work

After graduating from Mills College in California in the early 1960s, Reich

devoted several years to researching electro-acoustic media and sound, experimenting

with a tape recorder and tape loops. In the mid-1960s in San Francisco, Reich performed

works of some of his contemporaries, such as Pauline Oliveros and Terry Riley, and

collaborated with Riley on his famous In C by suggesting to Riely the addition of the

pulse line. In 1967 he began composing for acoustic musical instruments, exploring the

155 Kyle Gann notices the compositional process similar to the church organum of the twelfth century based on Perotinus-like gradual lengthening of the notes of a chant in several Reich’s pieces such as Four Organs (1970), Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ (1973), and Eight Lines (Octet, 1979). Kyle Gann, American music in the 20th century (Belmont: Schirmer Books, 1997), 187, 197, 200-2.

richness of colors they can produce. This resulted in the creation of Piano Phase, Violin

Phase, Four Organs, Drumming.

Reich relied on non-Western music in the early 1970s. Drumming (1971), like all

of Reich’s other early radical minimalist works, is rooted in a repetitive technique that

builds a gradual process with all changes audible to a listener. Drumming reflects Reich’s

interest in Gamelan music and West-African drumming. Reich composed this piece after

he returned from Ghana where he studied the drumming traditions of the Southern Ewe

dance.156 Drumming is a work for vocal-instrumental ensemble, or mallet percussion,

piccolo, and a combination of male and female voices. Preoccupied with non-Western

music, in 1974 in Writings about Music Reich expressed his consideration on the future

of Western music in which African, Indonesian, and Indian music would set new

structural models for Western musicians.157

Although Reich began drawing on Medieval musical techniques in his

compositions of the 1990s, it is not clear that he was always interested in this repertory.

From the 1980s, Reich’s stance and return to Western music become explicit. He was

influenced by the Western classical tradition among which he includes Jewish

cantillations. In his writings and interviews, he demonstrated a growing interest in

European classical music, primarily contrapuntal works from before 1750. Reich started

incorporating references from this music into certain works, among them Proverb, which

references Perotinus’s organa. With his turn to Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque

156 Kofi Agawu, “The Invention of ‘African Rhythm,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 48, 3 (Autumn, 1995), 380-395, 386. In Ghana in 1970, Reich was taught drumming by a professor Gideon Alorworye. 157 Reich, Steve. Writings about Music. Halifax, Nova Scotia: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974. Accessed September 20, 2018. http://www.ic.ucsc.edu/~dej/Ewha%20Materials/RHYTHM/Reich.Writings.pdf

53 music sources and techniques, Reich aligned himself with the musical practices of composers from the Western classical music canon.158

However, later, Reich claimed that he found non-Western music intriguing because of similar procedures with the classical music canon. Those are, as Reich perceived, contrapuntal aspects of both musical traditions. In 1985, he stated:

I look for the compositional procedures in terms of structural ideas of a contrapuntal nature, which, contrary to what we sometimes learned years ago, did not carry uniquely in the West. Certainly, overlapping drum patterns in African music are a clear kind of counterpoint; in the Balinese gamelan, certain lines and different metallophones are arranged in a way that is contrapuntal, but in an imitative way, and therefore closer to canon.159

In the 1980s, Reich’s claims over his influences also changed in the context of the non-

Western musical influences in his music. Namely, he saw an analogy between non-

Western musical structures and something familiar—Western counterpoint and canon.

But in the context of the canonical technique in the composer’s opus, it is hard to

distinguish what influences came first, Western or non-Western. I argue that

institutionalized musical education, in Reich’s case, had a major role in his polyphonic

approach to composition. It is also possible that his tape experiments first triggered such a way of thinking because from that moment the canon had become Reich’s musical and

158 When discussing his career path, Reich acknowledged that Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and the music of Miles Davis, Kenny Clark, and John Coltrane initially played an important role in his education and compositional style, and ultimately motivated him to pursue a career in music. Later, John Coltrane’s music, particularly the album Africa Brass (1961), had a significant impact on Reich’s music and the compositions of other minimalists. Reich sees Coltrane as one of his teachers while he was a student. The repetitiveness of his music and, especially, the single chord in the harmony progression of certain songs, inspired Reich to think about music differently than he was taught to. He talks that Coltrane is not just on his list of teachers at the time but of everyone in the generation who wrote minimal music. He adds that “Coltrane was a pivotal part of that.” Éric Darmon and Franck Mallet, “Steve Reich...,” op. cit. 159 Bruce Duffie, “Interview...,” op. cit.

compositional preoccupation. As Ronald Woodley wrote in celebration of Reich’s seventieth birthday on October 3, 2006: “It would be scarcely an exaggeration to say that canon has been a kind of unifying obsession for Steve Reich over more than forty years of compositional activity.”160 As already discussed, certain scholars, music critics, and

musicians recognized this obsession in the composer’s work as one of its distinguishing

features. Woodley, for example, agrees that canonic process has been a steady and lasting compositional tool for Reich since the mid-1960s and his early tape loops, through the ensemble compositions of the 1970s and 1980s, digital sampling in the 1980s, and multimedia works in the 1990s.161 Reich, again, observes canon as an abstract idea of

non-Western and, partially, Western music; it is the element of imitative counterpoint that

connects music from the thirteenth century (from Sumer Is Icumen In),162 the Baroque

period, and the 20th century (Webern’s Symphony, Bartók’s quartets, and piano music), and his music.163 Reich writes: “From other Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque

sources…, I learned that canon is a powerful compositional tool that can be applied

to any sound whatsoever.”164 Drawing a connection between these various traditions,

Reich binds the differences but also the similarities and relevance of his music directly to

those he considers important historical predecessors in Western classical music.

160 Ronald Woodley, “Steve Reich’s Proverb, Canon, and a Little Wittgenstein,” in Canons and Canonic Techniques, 14th–16th Centuries: theory, practice, and reception history, eds. Katelijne Schiltz and Bonnie J. Blackburn (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2007), 457-481, 457. 161 Bruce Duffie, “Interview...,” op. cit. 162 Reich’s statement coincides with the beginning of the increasing number of early music recordings among which The Hilliard Ensemble with Paul Hillier, the conductor, had significant role from the 1970s. This ensemble released the LP in the year Reich has made this statement. Bruce Duffie, “Interview...,” op. cit. Album is recorded in September 1984 in London: The Hilliard Ensemble, Summer Is Icumen In (Cants Médiévaux Anglais), Harmonia Mundi HMC 901154, 1985. This English ensemble has a first concert in 1973. “The Hilliard Ensemble,” ECM Records, official website, accessed December 11, 2018: https://www.ecmrecords.com/artists/1435046142/the-hilliard-ensemble 163 Bruce Duffie, “Interview...,” op. cit. 164 Steve Reich, Writings on Music, op. cit., 161.

Reich’s connection to the early music repertoire draws from the canonical

technique, which was, according to musicologist Oliver Wiener, less present in the music

of the 18th (and consequently 19th) century due to a change in aesthetics. Wiener writes,

“last but not least, canon is suspicious to Enlightened music aesthetics because of the fact

that it represents an eminently writing-addicted form of thinking or speculating

musically. In contrast, music aesthetics of the 18th century are addicted to sound.”165

From the late 1960s, this canonical ‘form of thinking’ in Reich’s case was related to his

phase shifting processes. Later, by distancing himself from the tape machine and turning

to instrumental performance of his works, the composer slowly began to step into the

aesthetics of subjectivity, still following the canonical music that is not from the

Enlightenment period.166

While Reich connects his music to early Western classical music through the use

of canons, at the same time he positions his canons as unique from all other canons. He

notes that, despite the similar procedure of his works to other contrapuntal

compositions, their sounds are extremely different. In Reich’s opinion, the concept of

canon, therefore, includes also his early phase shifting processes. He does observe not

only his technique as unique but also his placement among contemporary composers. In

1985, Reich claimed his music as “the exception” to the dominant neo-romantic

165 Olivier Wiener, “On the Discrepant Role of Canonic Techniques as Reflected in Enlightened Writings About Music,” in Canons and Canonic Techniques, 14th-16th Centuries: Theory, Practice, and Reception History, eds. Katelijne Schiltz, Blackburn, Bonnie J. (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 421-443, 441. Wiener deals with the 18th-century perception of canon in Germany and the Enlightened music literature. 166 Wiener claims that, since the 1960s, “canon has been produced in a purely mechanical way, as can be observed in Penderecki’s Kanon [for string Orchestra and two magnetic tapes]” and points out that recording techniques are the origin of Reich’s technique of ‘phasing.’” Idem, 442. “But in the face of today’s possibilities of technical recording and reproduction, the situation of and the challenges to creative processes have changed radically. Music is no longer associated with the machine metaphorically but collides with the ubiquitous presence of reproducing machines in a technical or technocratic space.” Ibid.

56 compositional school in the United States and Europe, which in his opinion includes composers Wolfgang Rihm, Heinz Karl Gruber, George Rochberg, and Fred Rzewski.167

Some basic structural ideas in Reich’s later works originated in his tape compositions. The electronic medium played an important role in the composer’s phase shifting processes, especially in the iconic works It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out

(1966). In It’s Gonna Rain Reich first elaborated and applied the phasing between two tape loops that, although played together, do not produce synchronous sound. The process of gradual phase shifting Reich later spanned to instrumental works beginning from Piano Phase (1967).

During the 1970s, Reich stopped experimenting with electronics168 and became

more interested in physical performance on acoustic music instruments, even though

from the 1980s his music sometimes included tape, electronic instruments, or amplified acoustic instruments.169 Similarly, Reich described the impact and the importance of electronic music in this way: “This feedback of ideas from electro-mechanical devices

167 Ibid. 168 Some of Reich’s works that include electric instruments (usually electric organs, keyboards, and electric guitars) are: Four Organs (electric organs, 1970), Phase Patterns (electric organs, 1970), Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ (electric organ, 1973), Tehillim (electric organs in both versions for voices and orchestra and for voices and ensemble, 1981), Sextet (synthesizers/keyboards, 1984), Electric Counterpoint (electric guitar, 1987), Typing Music (computer keyboard, 1993), City Lights (sampling keyboards, 1995), Proverb (sampling keyboards, 1995), Electric Guitar Phase (electric guitar, 2000), Tokyo/Vermont Counterpoint (KAT MIDI mallet, 2000), Radio Rewrite (electric bass, 2012), and – Pulse (electric bass guitar, 2015). 169 Four Organs, for example, implements electric organs, which indicates that the shift did not completely dismiss electronic media. Beginning in the 1970s, Reich began to turn away from electronic media towards live performance, primarily because, in Reich’s words, “the ‘perfection’ of rhythmic execution of the [Phase Shifting Pulse] gate or any electronic sequencer or rhythmic device was stiff and unmusical.” Reich further writes: “In any music that depends on a steady pulse, as my music does, it is actually tiny micro variations of that pulse created by human beings, playing instruments, or singing that gives life to the music. Last, the experience of performing by simply twisting dials instead of using my hands and body to actively create the music was not satisfying. All in all, I felt that the basic musical ideas underlying the gate were sound, but that they were not properly realized in an electronic device.” Steve Reich. Writings on Music, op. cit., 44.

and processes to instrumental music has brought me to think of electronic music as a kind

of interlude filled with new ideas for the ongoing history of instrumental and vocal

music.”170 Electronic music is also connected to Reich’s interests in popular music.

Reich’s composed Electric Counterpoint (1998) for the electric guitar and Pat Metheny,

2x5 (2009) for Bang on a Can, or Radio Rewrite (2011) referencing songs by the English

rock band Radiohead.

As he gradually shifted his approach to composition in the 1980s, Reich built the

narrative connecting his work to early classical music, through interviews, public speech,

and writings. In a 1976 interview with Michael Nyman, Reich for the first time claimed

that he was not interested in “genuinely minimal music,” but that he had always

been more influenced by the classical music of Europe from the 1200s to 1750.171

Similarly, in his book from 2002, the composer made a connection between Four

Organs (composed in 1970) as a music process and the augmentation in Leoninus’s and

Perotinus’s French organum. In the same source, the composer presented another link

with Medieval music through the piece Music for Eighteen Musicians (1976) only

emphasizing mutual elements between organum and his music.172 The fact that Reich

mentioned Medieval music for the first time in 1976 is not definitive proof that it had not influenced his earlier work.173 Nevertheless, his decision to begin speaking about

170 Idem, 45. 171 Steve Reich, Writings on music, op. cit. 172 Idem, 81. Paul Hillier, a performer of Reich’s music and the editor of this book, claims that canon “most closely corresponds to the idea of different views of the same object,” and that it “dominates Reich's musical processes.” He adds that “this feature links him to composers as far back as Perotin[us], Machaut, Dufay, Josquin, and, of course, Bach.” Paul Hillier, “Introduction,” in Writings on Music, op. cit., 4. 173 This is a substantial research that, however, might not manage to encompass all evidence in this matter. If there is an opposite information, it will not be excluded, but accepted for the sake of discussion.

Perotinus and Medieval canon at this time suggests that the composer’s rhetoric gradually

and audibly shifted from one phase of experimental minimalist view of sound to the

postminimalist phase with a new perspective on his work and music history.

Reich was not the only minimalist composer who drew from the early classical

music tradition. La Monte Young explained a connection between Medieval music and

musical minimalism in a 1980 conversation with Michael Nyman: “Climax and

directionality have been among the most important guiding factors [in music since the

thirteenth century], whereas music before that time, from the chants through organum and

[Guillaume de] Machaut, used stasis as a point of structure a little bit more the way

certain Eastern musical systems have.”174 Young’s interest in Asian musical systems

prevailed while Reich’s interests with Medieval and Western tradition in general only

continued to grow.

II. Institutions and Canonization of Reich’s Work

Reich's career has been influenced by the institutions that support his work

through commissions, media, and collaboration with renowned music ensembles. In the

1960s and early 1970s, Reich’s music was mostly performed at non-traditional concert

venues that supported experimental works of art, performances, and happenings, such as

the Whitney Museum and the Bottom-Line Cabaret. For example, in 1969, Reich

presented Pendulum Music at the Whitney Museum, in the exhibition “Anti-Illusion:

174 Richard Kostelanetz, “Conversation with La Monte Young,” from: Michael Nyman, “Against Intellectual Complexity in Music,” October 13 (Summer 1980), 81-89, accessed December 11, 2018: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3397703.

Procedures/Materials” as a Fluxus electronic work and performance.175 Reich emphasized that starting in 1976 with the premiere of Music for Eighteen Musicians at the Town concert hall, he started performing his music in more traditional music venues rather than

museums. He added that he was frequently invited to Europe by radio stations and

festivals to perform “at more or less normal concert venues.”176

Similarly, Four Organs was first performed at the Guggenheim Museum in New

York City in 1970. As Reich states in Writings on Music, he was invited by Michael

Tilson Thomas to perform this piece at the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1971 and

Carnegie Hall in 1973. On January 18, 1973, at the Carnegie Hall Spectrum Concerts

series, the audience had the opportunity to hear J. C. Bach’s Symphony for Double

Orchestra in E flat, Bartόk’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, and Liszt’s

Hexameron for Six Pianos and Orchestra.177 Four Organs was thus one of Reich’s first

pieces to have been performed for a larger audience at a more traditional classical music

concert venue.178

At this Carnegie Hall performance, Four Organs was met with an inflammatory

reaction. Michael Tilson Thomas, assistant director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at

that time and the initiator of the performance, commented that the audience’s reaction

175 In Whitney Museum, Reich performed his music in 1969, 1978, 1981 and 1993. This institution celebrated Reich’s birthday in 2000s. “All About Jazz,” accessed November 16, 2018: https://news.allaboutjazz.com/whitney-to-present-special-tribute-to-steve-reich-in-october-2006.php 176 Steve Reich, Writings on Music, op. cit., 221 177 “Michael Tilson Thomas & Steve Reich discuss Four Organs,, San Francisco Symphony, published on September 12, 2016; accessed November 16, 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkhNovHo1os; Steve Reich, Writings on Music, 1965–2000, ed. by Paul Hillier. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 51. 178 Reich's location in a cultural community sympathetic to a musical development that paralleled those in the plastic arts. Keith Potter, “Steve Reich: Thoughts for His 50th-Birthday Year,” The Musical Times 127, 1715 (January 1986), 16.

60 was loud and that some people were even shaking their fists.179 The musicians could not hear themselves playing. Hence, Thomas needed to count out the beats loudly. He added:

“Somehow we kept going. And at the end of the piece, there was a moment of silence, and then there was just an avalanche of noise.”180 He said to Steve Reich that this was a great moment because “nothing like this has happened since the premiere of The Rite of

Spring. For sure, by tomorrow, everyone in the world is going to know about you and your music. And that is what happened.”181 Thomas’s comparison between the scandalous reception at The Rite of Spring’s premiere in Paris in 1913 and the shocking response to Reich’s Four Organs six decades later at the beginning of his career, has similar popular receptions. The myth around the work of these two composers relates to the general context of initial negative reactions and the eventual acceptance of new compositional approaches in the history of music. Thomas’s statement opens a narrative that inserts Reich’s avant-garde music into the Western canon. Reich’s music eventually gained full recognition in Carnegie Hall in the 21st century, the venue of the previous riotous performance in 1973.

179 “Michael Tilson Thomas & Steve Reich discuss Four Organs, San Francisco Symphony, published on September 12, 2016; accessed November 16, 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkhNovHo1os 180 “Michael Tilson Thomas & Steve Reich…” op. cit. In his writings and talks, Reich also states that this performance provoked a riot. Steve Reich, Writings on Music, op. cit. 51. Harold C. Schoenberg, in the article “Music: A Concert Fuss” for New York Times, wrote that “the audience reacted as though red‐ hot needles were being inserted under fingernails. After a while there were yells for the music to stop, mixed with applause to hasten the end of the piece. At the end there were lusty boos. There also was a contingent that screamed approval. At least there was some excitement in the hall, which is more than can be said when most avant‐garde music is being played.” Harold C. Schoenberg, “Music: A Concert Fuss,” New York Times, January 20, 1973, online publication 1996, accessed December 3, 2018: https://www.nytimes.com/1973/01/20/archives/music-a-concert-fuss-piece-by-reich-draws-a-vocal- reaction-the.html 181 “Michael Tilson Thomas & Steve Reich…” op. cit.

During the 1990s, this canonization process was underway, and music critics

began writing about Reich and his music. One of the narratives that canonized Reich

came from Kyle Gann, who named Reich “the minimalist who communicates to

mainstream classical listeners.”182 According to Gann, Reich confirmed this status in the

1980s “when he became the first composer in decades whose music attracted a sell-out

crowd to Carnegie Hall.”183 Other narratives that elevated Reich’s role in the classical

music scene came mostly from influential American and British media sources. Critics

Alex Ross and Anne Midgettedes wrote that Reich was “the most original musical

thinker of our time” (The New Yorker, 2003)184 who is among the greatest living

composers (The New York Times).185 Similarly, The Guardian music critics stated that

“there’s just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the

direction of musical history, and Steve Reich is one of them.”186 The cause of Reich’s

popularity, particularly in American and British media, is related to the establishment of

Western canon through Western media.

By 2006, Reich’s canonization was near complete. Carnegie Hall, in collaboration

with the Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, paid homage to the

composer on his seventieth birthday. Carnegie Hall’s artistic adviser, Ara Guzelimian,

182 Kyle Gann, American music in the...,” op. cit., 187. 183 Ibid. 184 Alex Ross, “Opera as History: ‘Sophie’s Choice’ in London; A Steve Reich Extravaganza in Berlin,” New Yorker, January 6, 2003, accessed February 14, 2019: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/01/06/opera-as-history 185 Anne Midgettedes, “In a Mozart Year, Other Stars Blazed,” New York Times, December 24, 2006, accessed February 14, 2019: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/arts/music/24midg.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=25 E1F7E62D884E441EFD82AA33471788&gwt=pay 186 “Steve Reich,” Boosey & Hawkes, accessed February 14, 2019: https://boosey.com/pages/opera/composer/composer_main?composerid=2781&ttype=BIOGRAPH Y&ttitle=Biography

emphasized that Reich is the only person who could bring these competing arts

organizations together. She stated: “For once, rather than celebrate a composer’s 250

years after his birth, as the music world has done for Mozart this year, we are

celebrating… somebody [who is] sitting in our midst."187 Guzelimian’s comparison between a canonic composer (Mozart) and a living composer, elevated Reich’s position in a particular social and cultural context.188 Similarly, a decade later, Carnegie Hall commissioned a piece from Reich for the celebration of the composer’s eightieth birthday. Reich composed Pulse, which was performed on November 1, 2016.

Reich’s 21st-century portrayal in the Western media presents him as “great” and

“the most original,” and above all other composers whose names are connected to

minimalism (i.e., Gόrecki). Reich’s connection to American culture through music can be

interpreted from three different angles: 1) political and musical subjects in his music, 2)

the jazz influences on his music, and 3) his connection with American poetry. The themes

in some of his compositions reflect some major political events in the US. For example,

Reich dedicated Daniel Variations (2006) to Daniel Pearl, an American reporter who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in 2002. Claiming his political, human, and personal stance as an American composer, Reich composed another piece related to the World

Trade Center attack of September 11, 2001. The second aspect is Reich’s connection to jazz. As previously mentioned, John Coltrane’s music had a significant impact on US minimalists during the 1960s. Reich was also influenced by Kenny Clarke’s drumming skills and rhythms as well as Miles Davis’s tunes. And the third ‘national’ aspect is

187 Jeff Lunden, “New York Fetes Composer’s 70,” NPR, published October 1, 2006, accessed February 20, 2019: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6155645 188 Ibid.

evident in Reich’s setting of words by American poet William Carlos Williams in The

Desert Music (1983). This was the composer’s first work for a chorus and large orchestra.

In 1985, Reich thought of The Desert Music as one of the most important pieces he had ever composed: “using such a large ensemble and having it be successful… gave me the sense that anything is possible, that there was nothing out there that I couldn’t handle.”189 Not only did the composer have the opportunity to compose for the orchestra,

but he also performed his music in a classical fashion. After The Desert Music, Reich

composed several orchestral works mostly premiered by the San Francisco Orchestra.

However, The Desert Music was commissioned by The West German Radio in Cologne

and The Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, which points to the beginning of

Reich’s institutional acceptance and reputation in America and abroad. Later on, Reich’s

music was performed by some of the major music ensembles and orchestras, and it

gained international recognition. From the 1980s onwards, the experimental art venues

and museums where Reich’s music was performed transformed into classical concert

halls.

Keith Potter argued that in 1986, institutions and record labels played a major role

in expanding the audience for Reich’s music. Namely, Reich has become “known to

many people through the recordings of his music on the West German jazz label,

ECM.”190 Potter also comments on the reception of these minimalists’ work: “The

'classical music world' and the 'new music scene' which forms a small part of it have,

189 Bruce Duffie, “Interview...,” op. cit. In this interview, the composer emphasizes that The Desert Music was performed at the BBC Proms by the BBC orchestra, which was supposedly very important to state in the mid-1980s at the beginning of his acknowledgment by a big classical music institution. 190 Keith Potter, “Steve Reich: Thoughts...,” op. cit., 13-17, 13.

though, taken a noticeably keener interest in such music in the last ten years or so, and in

Britain more especially in the last two or three [years].”191 These types of music

institutions also cleared the path for Reich to be recognized. His seventieth birthday was

celebrated in Great Britain with a festival of concerts and events titled Phases performed

at the Barbican in London. 192 Along with concert halls and record companies, the third

type of institution that is important for Reich’s recognition in the Western repertoire is

ensembles. Among the influential ensembles that commissioned and performed Reich’s

music are the Kronos Quartet, Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, and

Bang on a Can.193

Reich also received many awards that elevated his position in the classical music

world. Different Trains, performed by Kronos Quartet and commissioned by Betty

Freeman, a supporter of contemporary American composers, won the Grammy Award for the Best Contemporary Composition in 1989. The Steve Reich Ensemble won another

Grammy award for the Best Small Ensemble Performance for Music for Eighteen

Musicians in 1998.194 A retrospective concert of Reich’s music followed in July 1999 at

191 Ibid. 192 “Over and Over Again. Steve Reich Phases: A Nonesuch Retrospective,“ The Guardian, September 16, 2006, accessed February 14, 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/sep/17/11 193 Performances for Ensemble Modern include Three Tales in 2002 in Vienna, Austria, for Bang on a Can 2x5 premiered in 2009 in Manchester, United Kingdom; then the piece City Life performed by Ensemble Intercontemporain in 1995 in Arsenal, France. Kronos Quartet has the biggest number of performances and commissions of Reich’s music. They premiered following pieces: Different Trains in 1988 in London, United Kingdom; Triple Quartet in 1998 in Washington DC, United States; and WTC 9/11, performed in 2010 in Durham, United States. 194 Recording Awards, Grammy Awards official website: https://www.grammy.com/grammys/artists/steve-reich

65 the Lincoln Center Festival.195 The recognition of his music culminated in 2009 with a

Pulitzer Prize for Music for Double Sextet (2007).196

III. Reich’s Relationship to the Early Music Movement

Reich’s relationship to the early music movement reflects the way he institutionalized his music. From the 1990s on, through certain institutions (ensembles, festivals, and record companies), Reich’s compositional influences turned to early music through the early music movement. Reich’s connection to Paul Hillier and his early

music ensembles, The Hilliard Ensemble and The Theatre of Voices, played a significant

role in Reich’s attitude toward Medieval and Renaissance music and his use of

polyphony in the works from the 1990s. In his public statements, Reich stressed his

interest in Perotinus’s music. Additionally, Reich started pointing out the influence of

early music and Perotinus in his whole opus. In 2014, at the university lectures in the City

University of New York, Reich said that he drew tremendous inspiration from

Perotinus.197 In his book, Reich acknowledged that he “received the suggestion that

195 Steve Reich, www.stevereich.com 196 During the 1990s, Reich was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1994) and won their Gold Medal in Music (2012), to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (1995); and was named Commandeur de l’ordre des arts et lettres in France (1999), as well as the Polar Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Music (2007) where he was elected to the Academy in 2008. On this occasion, with King Carl XVI Gustaf present, The Swedish Academy said: “Steve Reich has transferred questions of faith, society, and philosophy into a hypnotic sounding music that has inspired musicians and composers of all genres.” Some of the important awards Reich received are: the Schuman Prize from Columbia University (2000), the Montgomery Fellowship from Dartmouth College, the Regent’s Lectureship at the University of California at Berkeley, the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo, the Polar Music Prize in Stockholm, the BBVA Award in Madrid, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, Nemmers Prize in Music Composition from Northwestern University (2016). He has been awarded honorary doctorates from the California Institute of the Arts, the Royal College of Music in London, the Juilliard School, the Liszt Academy in Budapest (2007), and the New England Conservatory of Music. “Steve Reich,” Nonesuch, accessed December 11, 2018: http://www.nonesuch.com/artists/steve-reich; “Steve Reich,” op. cit: http://www.boosey.com/cr/music/Steve-Reich-The-Desert-Music/549 197 The Graduate Center, CUNY, “Steve Reich: Playing Music/Talking Music,” February 27, 2014, 1:03:20, accessed October 7, 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI25bqbzzNs

66 augmentation could be taken to great extremes and not just in simple multiples of two” from the Medieval composer.198 At that time, he also began collaborating with Hillier, who had already been deeply involved in the early music movement since the 1970s through singing, conducting, and recording.199

According to Reich, the idea for Proverb was suggested by Paul Hillier. Proverb was composed for Hillier’s ensemble in 1995 for a performance at the Utrecht Early

Music Festival.200 It was also co-commissioned by the BBC Proms as part of their 100th

Anniversary season that same year.201 Above all, in collaboration with Paul Hillier, in

2004, Reich published his book Writings on Music 1965-2000.202 Their collaboration during the 1990s was, therefore, quite significant and culminated with them working together on the book.

Hillier and Reich share similar ideas on the early music vocal style and historical performance. In his note on the vocal style in Proverb, Reich acknowledges those singers who “spent most of their lives singing what we call early music,” ascribing a historically

198 Steve Reich, Writings on Music, op. cit., 161 199 Paul Hillier is well-known for his interpretations of early music as well as contemporary (mostly minimalist) music. In 1989, release the CD The Hilliard Ensemble: Perotin within the ECM Record New Series. This record company started publishing Reich’s music from 1978 on. Paul Hillier, The Hilliard Ensemble: Perotin, CD ECM New Series 1385 (837-75192), Munich; Steve Reich Ensemble, Music for 18 Musicians, CD/LP, ECM New Series 1129, 1978. Even though Paul Hillier often performs Reich’s music, his is a conductor of another ensemble that is (appropriately) called Ars Nova Copenhagen. With this ensemble, in 2017 he premiered Reich’s work Know What Is Above You. 200 Steve Reich, “Note by the Composer,” Proverb, New York: Boosey & Hawkes Inc., 2015. 201 The piece is first performed as a partial work in progress on September 7, 1995 in Royal Albert Hall in London by the Ensemble Modern and the BBC Singers. Reich completed the piece in the same year, in December, and the finished version was performed at Lincoln Center, on February 10, 1996, by Paul Hilliar’s The Theater of Voices and members of the Steve Reich Ensemble. Steve Reich, Proverb, New York: Boosey & Hawkes Inc., 2015. Proverb’s (1995) final version is performed in 1996 by Paul Hillier in Carnegie Hall. This piece is dedicated to Hillier who sparked its creation and it shows their common interest in Perotinus’s music. Paul Hilliar with The Hilliard Ensemble published the album with Perotinus’s music several years after Proverb, in 1989. The Hilliard Ensemble, Perotin, ECM 1385, 1989. 202 Along with his earlier essays Music as a Gradual Process from 1968 and Writings about Music from 1974, this is significant writing about his music because it includes both of these along with other Reich’s essays, many interviews, and Reich’s notes and comments for the majority of his compositions.

informed performance style to this work.203 Reich has been interested in historical

performance in general. In a 1995 interview, he states: “I like old music played on the

original instruments, and I like the mentality that goes with it. I like the enthusiasm that

someone like [Nikolaus] Harnoncourt has and can bring to music.”204 Reich’s attitude

towards Harnoncourt’s aesthetic as a conductor and reproduction of period musical

instruments also explains his curiosity toward historical vocal performance.

Reich emphasized the importance of collaborating with Hillier in many aspects of

his works, such as The Cave. The collaboration between the two artists began in 1993

when Hillier conducted the premiere of Reich’s opera. Reich found Hillier’s engagement

with early music very important for this project: “The conductor [of The Cave] was Paul

Hillier, who’s world-famous as one of the great interpreters of earlier music and the very

beautiful music of Arvo Pärt, which in itself refers back to earlier music.”205 Reich

noticed the commonalities between Pärt’s works and the early music movement. What connects Hillier, Pärt, and Reich is not only the idea of sound and structure of early music but also the perceived elements of spirituality and sacredness shared by both. Another connection between them is the record company ECM. Hillier’s The Hilliard Ensemble began collaborating with ECM in 1986, performing Arvo Pärt’s Arbos, and the record label has promoted Reich’s compositions since 1978, beginning with its release of Music for Eighteen Musicians on LP.206 After The Cave and Proverb, in 1999 Reich

collaborated on another project with Hillier.

203 Steve Reich, Proverb, for voices, vibraphone, and keyboards, Boosey & Hawkes, New York, 1995. Also: Bruce Duffie, “Interview...,” op. cit. 204 Ibid. 205 Ibid. 206 “The Hilliard Ensemble,” ECM Records, official website, accesses December 11, 2018: https://www.ecmrecords.com/artists/1435046142/the-hilliard-ensemble, “Steve Reich/Discography,” ECM

Hillier’s ensemble later performed another Reich’s piece inspired by early music,

Know What Is Above You. It is a short polyphonic composition for three sopranos, one

alto, and the accompaniment of a repeated rhythmic drum pattern. The piece was

commissioned for the early music vocal group Anonymous in 1999.207 Know What is

Above You, like Proverb, draws from early music again in the context of the historically

informed vocal performance. Furthermore, in this piece Reich blended influences of his

Jewish origin and interest in Jewish texts with the early music movement ideals of the

early music sound. Ideally, singers trained in early music performance should sing vocal

parts that are based on an excerpt from a small tractate Pirke Avot from the Mishna, the

earliest part of the Talmud.208

The following text of Know What is Above You is from Pirke Avot 2:1: “Know

what is above you. An eye that sees, an ear that hears, and all your deeds recorded in a

book.”209 Reich stated that the text for this composition “suggests that we are not alone, that an Eternal Being cares about us, that our every thought, word, and deed has its effect

on our character, our soul, and on the souls of those around us—and that it all really

matters.”210 Opposite from his notes on Tehillim and Proverb, Reich wrote about Know

What is Above You with more details that step beyond the work’s structure or technique

he used. He described the text choice presenting his philosophical thoughts on people’s

souls, making the statement very personal. Although Reich spoke about this piece

Records, official website, accesses December 11, 2018: https://www.ecmrecords.com/catalogue/143038752100/steve-reich-music-for-18-musicians-steve-reich- ensemble 207 Steve Reich, Writings on Music, op. cit., 211 208 Ibid. 209 Reich states that this text deals with ethics and that it became very popular and often present in prayer books in traditional Judaism. Ibid. 210 Ibid.

differently than Proverb or Tehillim, he based Know What is Above You on compositional

principles and ideas from these two works. Like in Proverb, Reich augments the motif

throughout the-1999 piece, basing the exposition of the melodic material on the canonic

technique. The piece is also centered in one key – in this case, it is G minor. Voices are

accompanied by three small tuned drums that Reich compares to those in Tehillim.211

What connects this piece tightly to Proverb is their link to the early music movement and

specific aesthetics of the vocal timbre.

IV. Proverb in Canon

At the premiere and in the 1995 recording, Proverb was sung by Paul Hillier and

his renaissance vocal group The Hilliard Ensemble. It is a piece inspired by Perotinus’s

music and initiated by and dedicated to Hillier. Proverb is written for three lyric

sopranos, two tenors, four keyboards, and two vibraphones (with their motors off). The

composer’s instructions on the singing style are: “All singers sing non-vibrato

throughout.”212 The interesting timbral feature in Proverb is the combination of

Medieval/Renaissance voices, Baroque organ sound of the keyboards that fill the

harmonies, and vibraphones that resonate with Reichian pulses in changing meters that

accentuate groups of two and three beats. These metrical shifts of every second and third

accentuated quarter note rely on the idea of changes first introduced in Tehillim. Also,

with constant metric changes, Proverb accentually resembles his previous work.

Analogous to the tambourine pulse in Tehillim, the vibraphone parts provide the pulse for

211 Ibid. 212 Steve Reich, “Performance Notes,” Proverb, New York: Boosey & Hawkes, 2015.

the whole piece. Metric changes make vocal lines more flexible and freer of the measure

beats and constrain and easier to perceive as references to long Medieval melodies.

A pulse is present in all of Reich’s pieces as a main stylistic feature, and it is also

an important characteristic of this composition. It has been a sonic marker of Reich’s

music since his early works, such as Pulse Music and Pendulum Music. For example, in

Four Organs, there is a steady eighth-note beat played by maracas throughout the whole

piece. In Proverb, vibraphone pulses provide steady chords in the middle register, highly

articulated with rubber or medium wrapped mallets.213 Robert Schwarz, a critic and

music scholar who specializes on Reich’s music, asserts that “focus on the middle

which the harmonic cycle’s middle register remains intact, but its bass is frequently

altered.”214 Reich also points out the importance of the middle register claiming that

pulsating chords at the beginning of Music for Eighteen Musicians brought him a new

idea of the middle register extension and not the bass register.215 Pulse in Proverb is a

‘subtactile pulse,’ as Taruskin defines it, a strongly articulated and steady rhythmical unit

“that lies beneath the level of the 'felt beat,' or tactus, the beat that conductors show or

that we normally walk or waltz or exercise to.”216 It is, in other words, something tightly

213 In the score, the composer the term “wound mallets.” Steve Reich, Proverb, op. cit. In 1975, the composer started implementing pulsating chords as a stable layer of acoustic music, starting from a vocal-instrumental piece Music for Eighteen Musicians. Roeder claims that “an informal examination of Reich’s transitional music of the early 1970’s motivates the focus on accent.” In his article, Roeder examines beat-class modulation and the connections between the intonation, beat and rhythm in selected works by Reich. John Roeder, “Beat-Class Modulation in Steve Reich's Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 25, no. 2 (2003): 275-304. 214 Schwarz, K. Robert. “Process vs. Intuition in the Recent Works of Steve Reich and John Adams.” American Music 8/3 (1990): 245–73, 249. 215 Rebecca Y. Kim, “From New York to Vermont...,” op. cit. 216 Richard Taruskin, “A Sturdy...,” op. cit. Taruskin believes that the magic of the pulse is best demonstrated in Reich’s Four Organs, “in which the systematically expanding phrases on the surface

71 connected to the human senses. Vibraphones in Proverb play irregular metrical patterns, in the steady and recognizable Reichian beat, harmonically supported by keyboards in the same middle register.

In Proverb, Reich sets a small part of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s text from one of his philosophical essays in Culture and Value: “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.”217 These lines may also reflect the reductionist ideas of the minimalist style.218 In

Wittgenstein’s language game, there are causalities between words and music that cause communicative gestures in the work.219

Example 2.1: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, aphorism from the manuscript written on September 2, 1946

How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life! Just as someone may travel around the same little country throughout his whole life, & think there is nothing outside it! You see everything in a queer perspective (or projection): the country that you ceaselessly keep covering, strikes you as enormously big; the surrounding countries seem to you like narrow border regions.220

would be as uninterestingly arcane as most contemporary classical music, instead of riveting and elating, but for the maracas that sound out the subtactile pulse.” Ibid. 217 In “Notes of the Composer,” Reich added another Wittgenstein’s line from Culture and Value to this text: “if you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far.” It is not included in the work itself. 218 Ivan Hewett in a CD review of Proverb wrote that the text Reich chose presents “the motto of the whole minimalist enterprise.” Ivan Hewett, CD review, 21, accessed December 9, 2018: https://www- jstor-org.access.library.miami.edu/stable/pdf/1003590.pdf 219 In one of the first writings on Reich and Wittgenstein, Robert Cowan claims that at an ISCM American music workshop on 27 July 1985, before The Desert Music was premiered in Britain, Reich replied to a question if his philosophical studies influenced his music, “that the later Wittgenstein had provided a certain mode in terms of clarity and precision.” Cowan comments: “it seems that the philosopher who 'was not, strictly speaking, a learned man' was no more a typical scholar than the wholly unaffected Steve Reich is a typical composer: both wandered off well-worn tracks in order to contemplate and develop a sort of 'lateral' extension of their art.” Robert Cowan, “Reich and Wittgenstein: Notes towards a Synthesis,” Tempo, New Series, 157 (Jun 1986), 2-7, 2-3. 220 Translation from German from the following edition: Ronald Woodley, Steve...,” op. cit., 446.

There are several explanations for Reich’s decision to choose Wittgenstein’s words.

Woodley assumes that the use of Wittgenstein’s aphorism was the parallel between

Wittgenstein’s “small thought” and Reich’s “highly channeled compositional

aesthetic.”221 One, perhaps even more obvious explanation is Reich’s familiarity with

Wittgenstein’s work. The composer graduated from Cornell University with a major in philosophy, and the topic of his final study was Wittgenstein. However, when he got an offer to compose Proverb, Hillier suggested that he set the piece to the Song of Songs.

Later, they decided to refer to the biblical book of Proverbs.222 Reich’s fascination with

biblical texts eventually turned to Reich’s interest in Wittgenstein.

Proverb demonstrates Perotinus’s influence in the long-held tones in the female

vocal parts and the keyboard sections alla organs (Example 2.2). By adding vibraphones

as the third musical layer, Reich builds his ‘small [melodic] thought’ through the

complexities of references to Perotinus, early music, and his own music that include

organs, vibraphones, or irregular meter. The reduction of compositional and musical

means connects Proverb to Reich’s minimalist style and earlier works. Furthermore,

Reich treats Wittgenstein’s text, whether in whole or in its segments, through constant

repetition. With it, the composer creates an extremely melismatic tenor section. In that

sense, Reich draws from Perotinus’s Viderunt Omnes in terms of stepwise melodic

motion and melodic paraphrasing.

Another similarity between Proverb and Viderunt Omnes is the repetitive

rhythmical and melodic motif in tenor sections that is based on isorhythm. Besides often

221 Katelijne Schiltz and Bonnie J. Blackburn, Canons and Canonic Techniques..., op. cit., 466. 222 Ronald Woodley, Steve...,” op. cit., 466.

repetition of the whole motif, Viderunt Omnes includes talea between different melodic

motifs. Proverb, on the other hand, leans toward color patterns. However, those repeated

melodies are not entirely strict but rather rely on Reich’s technique of addition and subtraction of notes. In every repetition of the motif, Reich adds or subtracts mostly one note from the initial theme. Despite the small changes, those melodies stay (audibly and

texturally) recognizable and give the impression of constant color-like repetition.

Additionally, in Proverb’s tenor sections, Reich relies on the melody exposed in

the soprano parts (reflected particularly in the descending perfect fourth and fifth at the

end of the final textual-melodic phrase). The motif in the tenor sections is also based on

Perotinus’s piece in the context of rhythmical patterns and substitution of the quarter and

eight notes. It is not a direct quotation, but a simulation that, along with the rhythm,

reflects a step-wise motion of Viderunt Omnes in minor and major seconds.

Example 2.2: Perotinus’s influence; a comparison between tenor lines in Proverb and

Viderunt Omnes

a) The opening of Perotinus’s Viderunt Omnes, mm. 1-5223

223 Perotinus, Viderunt Omnes, ed. Philip Legge, 1972, IMSLP first publication 2007.

b) The opening of the tenor section in Reich’s Proverb, mm. 56-65224

Instrumentation: Keyboard 1, 2, Soprano 1, 2, 3, Tenor 1, 2

Proverb begins with a two-voice canon at the unison in a Reichian manner that Woodley calls a ‘prismatic’ way of “using the added dimension of canon” by exploring the harmonic and intervallic potential of the theme.225 This is a strict canon in unison at the imitation distance of five quarter notes. The second imitation increases the distance to eight and then, for the third time, to twelve notes. By choosing canon in unison, Reich may symbolically relate this work with his narratives on unison canons in his early

works. Proverb employs multiple canons that Reich augments in all three sections (mm.

90-160; 225-348; 384-627).226 Sections with long notes, and without canon and imitation, are static. They represent big structural and dramaturgical segments in Proverb (Example

224 Steve Reich, Proverb, for voices, vibraphone, and keyboards, Boosey & Hawkes, New York, 1995. 225 Ronald Woodley, Steve...,” op. cit., 470. 226 Idem, 479.

4: mm. 198-224 in Sections 2 /with augmentation/, and Coda /without augmentation/,

mm. 628-58) because of their harmonic structure.227 Since Perotinus’s ograna are polyphonic and not canonic pieces, the canonic technique in Proverb is, paradoxically,

Reich’s step away from Perotinus and early music of his time, but step closer to the early music movement and connection to the early music ideals through form.

Example 2.3: Harmonized, non-canonic sections in Proverb

a) Sections 2 (mm. 198-224), mm. 200-6, augmentation228

Instrumentation: Vibraphone 1, 2, Keyboard 1, 2, Soprano 1, 2, 3, Tenor 1

227 Idem, 464, 479. 228 Steve Reich, Proverb, op. cit.

b) Coda (mm. 628-58), mm. 631-40, without augmentation229

Instrumentation: Vibraphone 1, 2, Keyboard 1, 2, Soprano 1, 2, 3, Tenor 1

Some of the main features that connect Reich’s work to early music are the use of a non- vibrato ‘early singing’ style of the setting of Wittgenstein’s proverb and the augmentation of the canonic processes that can partly be found in Music for Eighteen Musicians and

Tehillim prior to Proverb. Frequent changes of meter (2/4, 5/8, 6/8, 7/8…) add to the flexibility of the rhythm and melody of the syllabic soprano theme and, somewhat, of the tenor section. These changes, however, contribute to the distinct beat when vibraphones enter (m. 90). The overall sound of the piece resembles the constructed Medieval sound by the ensembles that belong to the early music movement. Given these structural elements, references to Perotinus’s music, and the melodic structure in Proverb, this piece has a significant component of non-minimalist features.

229 Ibid.

V. Communicative Gestures in Proverb

All of the polyphonic techniques Reich implements in his minimalist and postminimalist opus specifically communicate with the audience through audible gradual processes of substituting beats for rests, or, later, references to his own work or music

history.230 Similar to his phase shifting gradual processes, Reich’s new procedures,

techniques, and references in Proverb show his intention for the audience to connect with

his work, only in a different manner.231 From phase shifting to Perotinus-like isorhythmic

structures and canon, Reich always employs a number of minimalistic principles in his

work. Those principles are often common to early music, such as repetitiveness, pulse,

long tones/drones, augmentation, etc. Reich employs these components for the sake of

either gradual process of his early works or, later, a movement structure of pieces, careful

listening, and musical effect. Thus, the listener can always follow the repetitiveness of

patterns or (longer) musical phrases.

Canonic technique is the main structural foundation for all of Reich’s works

before Proverb, and a technique that connects Reich’s music and the early music

repertory of Western music history. Another rhetorical structure in Proverb is a vocal part

that corresponds to the text. Vocal parts, as previously discussed, reference the idea of

early music singing that is tightly related to historically constructed performance by early

music movement performers. Such referentiality allows the audience to connect with the

piece on different levels rather than only through strict, radical minimal gradual

230 Reich spoke numerous times how gradual processes in particular can and should physically affect a listener. 231 Woodley claims that: “Canon, as so often throughout music history, is being used as a mechanism for de-naturing its own materials at the same time as opening them up to intense structural and psychological scrutiny.” Idem, 458.

78 processes. It transforms Reich’s music from an absolutely nonnarrative form to music that holds certain ideas, associations, or metaphors that could even categorize it as a narrative work.232

Furthermore, the vocal part is shaped by its relationship to the text. The flux of words forms the melody, or the rhythm of the music just like in the majority of sacred music pieces, although it may not be the rule in Perotinus’s music, given that he stretches

out chant in long jubilations. However, the melismatic text setting also used to have its

function related to the meaning of the text or the service.233 In Proverb, sopranos syllabically deliver the text line “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.”

Although with a possibility of being segmented into three parts,234 this theme represents a coherent continuous phrase of eleven bars (Example 2.4). When compared to Reich’s

232 Regarding narrative in minimalist music, many theorists and musicologists would agree that minimal music does not have narrative. For example, in Writings Through Music, a musicologist Jann Pasler explores minimalist works as “works that may use elements of narrative but without allowing them to function as they would in a narrative.” Jann Pasler, Writings Through Music: Essays on Music, Culture, and Politics, Oxford University Press, 2008, 40. Byron Almén and Robert Hatten (2010) suggest that unlike those pieces “that are strongly actorial and contain clear agential profiles” and that could be approached with traditional methods, many 20th century pieces are explicitly anti-teleological and antinarrative although they contain “narrative potential to the degree that the listener imposes such an interpretation.” Byron Almén and Robert S. Hatten, “Narrative Engagement with Twentieth-Century Music: Possibilities and Limits,” Music and Narrative Since 1900, ed. By Michael L. Klein and Nicholas Reyland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013, 77. However, music semiotician Eero Tarasti claims that every antinarrative work is in a way narrative. He admits that the problem of musical antinarrativity is very broad and related only to the temporal organization of the work. Narrativity is based on special, temporal, actorial categories, and the modality in music. Eero Tarasti, The Musical Semiotics. 285. Similarly, Joshua Banks Mailman argues that the agency has a big impact on narrativity. In minimalist music, the initiation of a process and the creation of a process are, in his opinion, significant exercises of the agency. The author believes that “since processive minimalist compositions often lack junctures of volition within their time frames and also lack stylistic conventions, the narrative interpretation of these works requires more ad hoc imaginative play, which cannot rely on stable symbolism (or semiosis) the way more conventional music can.” However, he does not diminish the possibility of narrative analysis of a minimalist (or postminimalist) composition. Joshua Banks Mailman, “Agency, Determinism, Focal Time Frames, and Processive Minimalist Music,” Music and Narrative Since 1900, ed. By Michael L. Klein and Nicholas Reyland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013, 127, 140. 233 Here, I refer to the Christian (Medieval) music of East and West. 234 Ronald Woodley, Steve...,” op. cit., 466-8.

works that predate Proverb (with the clear exception of Tehillim that also uses a similar

approach to text setting), this is an atypical melody for Reich primarily for its length. The

repetitiveness of such a melodic phrase is, consequently, different in Proverb than in, for

example, Music for Eighteen Musicians or, perhaps, Drumming, works that include very short repetitive patterns.

Example 2.4: The opening of Proverb, mm.1-11, soprano theme235

As in some pieces prior to Proverb, such as Music for Eighteen Musicians (1976), Reich

turns to tonality and form. Specifically, in Music for Eighteen Musicians, Reich draws

from harmony using eleven pulsing chords that repeat throughout the whole piece, which

is structured as ABCDCBA. Similarly, Proverb has three sections and a Coda (B minor,

E flat minor, B minor). Because they implement these forms, Tehillim and Music for

Eighteen Musicians, as well as Proverb, are non-minimalist works. Such a form would,

according to Masnikosa, imply a postminimalist postmodernism “in which minimalist

segments dominate “but are not the only contents of the composition.”236 This rhetorical

235 Steve Reich, Proverb, op. cit. 236 Marija Masnikosa, “A Theoretical Model...,” op. cit., 307.

80 power of form in Proverb distinguishes this piece as postminimalist and suitable for some further examination through the theory of narrativity.237

Reich’s use of narrative techniques in Proverb represents the evolution of his minimalist style and aesthetics that started in the 1960s. In postminimalism, Reich draws not only from his own music, non-Western music, and tape recorder but also adds another layer of meaning and sound through references to early music and historically informed performance of early music. In Proverb, these references, text setting, and compositional components (melody, meter, and rhythm) are used as rhetorical means in a postminimalist postmodern piece which is open to other interpretations.238

Proverb is a paradigmatic example of Reich’s music that poses many influences blended into one piece. It is a continuation of Reich’s minimalist ideas on the brevity and reduction of text, melodic motifs, and ensemble, but also their extension. This piece reflects Reich’s aspirations toward canonic technique, philosophical thoughts, and passion towards Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Besides self-referentiality, Reich incorporated other layers that define his postminimalist compositional style influenced by

237 Furthermore, Pasler believes that in minimalist compositions “Beginning and end merely frame the processes, articulate the work’s boundaries, and separate it from real time; they do not serve to unify the whole” This point of view may apply even for those works Reich composed after 1975, generally perceived as postminimalist or postminimalist postmodern. However, she considers a clear organizing principle and the arch form of Music for Eighteen Musicians as the element of narrativity in a nonnarrative work. Since Proverb shares similar features, there is a potential of expanding this analysis into the direction of narrativity. 238 Since it employs not only a minimalistic technique and (a continuation of Reich’s) minimalist aesthetics and style, but also historical, musical, and textual references to early music and Perotinus, there is a possibility of observing it, further, through the theory of musical narrativity. Particularly, music with textual setting is more convenient for reading in this context. In Proverb, other factors could also be correlative to this theoretical approach, such as a more traditional repetitiveness, text, and voice compared to Reich’s early works. On another note, in Proverb, Reich approaches to music as a mean of expression that makes this work distinctive in his opus that can thus communicate with the listener on various levels.

the early music movement, Perotinus’s work, and early music canon. Proverb has a

visible non-minimalist layer that qualifies it to become a postminimalist piece. Its form

and goal-oriented melody and harmonic process move it away from minimalist aesthetics

of a process that lacks goal or motion. Moreover, since Proverb is marked with non-

minimalist references to Perotinus’s music from its beginning to its end, and given that it

relies on a movement form created through extensive melodies, Proverb is a

postminimalist work with a significant amount of non-minimalist elements. Thus, in the

context of the historical reference to early music timbre and imitational compositional

technique, Proverb belongs within a category that defines postmodern works with

significant non-minimalist parts that has been defined by Masnikosa as postminimalist

postmodernism.

CONCLUSION

REICH AND CANON

From minimalist experimental works in the 1960s and early 1970s that included

tape loops and non-Western music rhythms, Reich’s aesthetics in the 1980s shifted to

Western classical music. Reich’s reference to Bach’s and, later, Perotinus’s music in

Tehillim and Proverb represents a change in his attitude toward Western European musical influences. In that sense, Tehillim marks a turning point in Reich’s compositional output and the change in the composer’s approach to his work aesthetics in the pieces that followed, including Proverb.

Additionally, in the early 1980s, audiences received Reich’s new works more openly partly due to new elements reflected in his musical style. A different approach to musical components of melody, text, and canonic technique increased audience accessibility to his music. New elements of his style, such as textual setting, had an effect on Reich’s melodic phrases and, consequently, his use of the canonic technique. Different from Reich’s phase, shifting works with short repetitive phrases, Tehillim and Proverb have more traditional canonic imitative segments with long melodic-rhythmic phrases. A new stylistic feature of Tehilim and, later, Proverb is also their referentiality to Bach and

Perotinus. All these factors serve as communicative gestures that were examined in

Proverb with more detail.

Tehillim and Proverb are postminimalist works in the manner of technique and style. They implement a minimalist technique, but they do not represent traditional minimalist pieces since they do not exhibit minimalist music processes of “audible

structure” from their beginning to their end. These compositions are postminimalist

works based on tonality and music structure traditionally organized in movements (parts),

and both include references (paraphrases and references to technique) to other music.

Constant pulses in percussion sections are clear Reichian features in these works. From

Tehillim on, the composer began incorporating constant irregular beats and metric shifts

that, as is also seen in Proverb, affect the fluidity of melody and text as if there are no

metrical constraints. Thus, the pulse and percussion ensemble still have a significant role

in Reich’s opus, as in Tehillim and Proverb; these elements connect his works, not just to

minimalist aesthetics and techniques, but also to the African and Indonesian musical

influences from his early career.

As Reich’s postminimalist pieces, Tehillim and Proverb retained features of his

minimalist works, such as a steady pulse, consonances, repetitiveness, augmentation, but

they also have non-minimalist elements such as traditional form, contrasting movements

or parts, references to other music, and clear harmonic progression. Additionally, in

Tehillim, some of those postminimalist features include long melodic phrases that strive

towards their end or goal and hierarchy of vocal parts compared to the accompaniment of

strings and percussions. In Proverb, non-minimalist elements are those that carry ‘double

coded’ elements of the piece, such as vocal timbre and long melodic lines that resemble

early music and performance, as well as a repetitive motif in tenor sections that

references Perotinus’s music. Specifically, in Tehillim, Reich rejects a minimalistic

approach to a minimal amount of contrast between musical elements exposed at the

beginning of the piece. Instead, Reich creates a four-movement piece with different texts

and themes that contrast in melody, rhythm, dynamics, and character. In other words,

both Tehillim and Proverb are based on many aspects of minimalism and its technique,

but are neither strict, controlled, gradual, nor “audible [minimalist] structures.”

Furthermore, Reich approaches vocal parts in Tehillim and Proverb differently than in his

earlier works. From experimental tape modifications of voice and experiments with

signing resulting patterns in Drumming, Reich composed postmodern expressive vocal lines with a textual meaning in both Tehillim and Proverb.

Regarding these stylistic components, Tehillim and Proverb are postmodern

works that, in Kramer’s words, transform rather than conserve the past or they

“simultaneously embrace and repudiate history”239 and do not respect “boundaries

between sonorities and procedures of the past and of the present.”240 Both Tehillim and

Proverb, are inspired by early music that may or may not bring sonorities of the past.

They refer to Bach’s and Perotinus’s compositional techniques of doubling and

isorhythm by embracing them but also by repudiating them in Reich’s own compositional

manner. That is most obvious in Reich’s isorhythmic patterns in Proverb that do not

follow the strict concept of talea or color one may notice in Perotinus’s organa.

Tracing Kramer’s other traits of a postmodern work, I find several of them

relevant to Reich’s selected works. Both Tehillim and Proverb are relevant to the cultural,

social, and political context, whether through Reich’s Judaism and the socio-cultural

concept of Judeo-Christianity or through the early music performance revival. Those

layers of “double coding” in Tehillim and Proverb leave (a postmodern) space for

239 Jonathan D. Kramer, “The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism,” op. cit, 7. 240 Idem, 10.

multiple interpretations and meanings as well as observation of their multiple

temporalities.

Since Kramer presented postmodernism as an attitude more than a historical

period, Reich’s “social saturation,” and his self-positioning or “postmodern self” are also

important when discussing Reich’s style and works. According to Kramer, the

(postmodern) self is constantly in flux under the influence of others. Therefore, in the

1980s, Reich’s shift in claims over his influences, his attitude toward Western classical

music, and his collaboration with early music movement are also important for his

compositional approach in Tehillim and, consequently, Proverb.241

Based on Masnikosa’s division of postminimalism as postmodernist minimalism and postminimalist postmodernism, I categorize Tehillim and Proverb as postminimalist postmodern works. I do not observe them as postmodernist minimalist works since in that regard, they would need to include only “grafted procedures” and traces of non- minimalist musics. I argue that both compositions include significant non-minimalist segments obvious in hymn-like singing with the (mostly) drone accompaniment in most

parts of all movements in Tehillim and in the vocal parts’ melody, rhythm, timbre, and

text in Proverb. In other words, both pieces are stylistically based on minimalist

technique but, at the same time, are heterogeneous which makes them postminimalist and

also postmodernist.

However, Tehillim and Proverb differ from Reich’s other postminimalist works,

such as Music for Eighteen Musicians (1976), New York Counterpoint (1985), or Double

Sextet (2007). In order to define their style more clearly in the context of Reich’s

241 Idem, 10-15.

aesthetics, this thesis relies on Masnikosa’s theory on postminimalist categories of

postmodernist minimalism and postminimalist postmodernism. Tehillim and Proverb have codes and procedures significantly influenced by non-minimalist music. Therefore, they are categorized as postminimalist postmodernist compositions, those that can be observed both as postminimalist and postmodernist works.242 Tehillim uses compositional

techniques of canon and imitation typical of Bach, with the dominant non-vibrato

sopranos and winds over the Reichian static string ensemble. New elements in Tehillim,

Proverb, and Reich’s opus include the treatment of melodic-rhythmic long phrases in

imitation and constant variation through repetition, as well as homophonic hymn-like

segments with prominent vocal parts. These are neither minimalist nor strictly

postminimalist features but can be ascribed to a number of postmodern works. However,

Tehillim and Proverb still possess significant elements of Reich’s minimalist technique,

such as repetition, reduction, and augmentation. Tehillim and Proverb fit Kramer’s

explanation of postmodern works because they “simultaneously embrace and repudiate

history,”243 and “[do] not respect boundaries between sonorities and procedures of the past and of the present.”244 Both pieces have musical features that are tied to several traits

of musical postmodernism Kramer presented. For example, Proverb includes references

to a certain musical tradition; both works are relevant to the cultural, social, and political

context, which is reflected in Reich’s relationship with the early music movement,

242 Marija Masnikosa, op. cit. 301-302 243 Jonathan D. Kramer, “The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism,” op. cit., 7. 244 Idem, 10.

Jewishness, and the issue of Judeo-Christianity, which all may create multiple meanings

for a listener.245

In this regard, Tehillim has features of a postminimalist postmodern work because

it includes significant non-minimalist features in it. In its approach to musical elements

and canonic technique, I argue that Proverb is a continuation of aesthetics explored in

Tehillim. Proverb significantly refers to early music sound ideals, most of all in a

cappella segments or parts with non-vibrato voices and keyboard accompaniment without

vibraphones. The flux of melody and rhythm and metrical ambiguity are non-minimalist

music elements. Proverb, as Tehillim, has elements of minimalist style and technique

evident in Reich’s augmentation, pulsation, and repetitiveness of melodies. Non-

minimalist elements take significant segments in both works; they are audible and

structurally important. Hence, I categorize them as postminimalist postmodern.246

Classical Western influences on his music became very important for Reich in

Tehillim and Proverb.247 Reich acknowledged Bach’s music in his writings and

interviews regarding Tehillim, thus positioning himself more closely to the Western tradition. By referring to his Jewish origins in Tehillim, he claimed that Jewish cantillations represent a Western musical tradition older than Medieval or Baroque

musical traditions.248

245 Idem, 10-11. 246 The intertextuality, as one of the features of postmodern works, is reflected in Tehillim and Proverb in their connections with various texts such as Wittgenstein’s philosophical discourse, psalm texts, sacred Medieval music, Perotinus’s organum, Reich’s ideas of connecting with Bach through similar techniques, and spirituality in general. 247 About the dissimilarity between Tehillim and other Reich’s pieces, Reich said: “I think if somebody heard It’s Gonna Rain and then heard Daniel Variations or even Tehillim, they might not think it’s the same composer. And I am delighted, I think it is great!” Tommy Pearson, “Reich on Reich,” Boosey & Hawkes, accessed, 8:33-8:45, http://www.boosey.com/podcast/13107 248 On Jewish cantillations as part of the Western tradition, Reich talked already in 1985: Bruce Duffie, o In Tehillim and Proverb, the minimalist aesthetic of the ‘non-narrative work-in-progress’ that

Therefore, Tehillim represents not only the first postmodern piece in which Reich tries to refer to another composer’s work, but it is also the first piece that reflects Reich’s turn to the Hebrew tradition and Judaism. Claiming his influences from the Western musical canon more firmly, among which he also included his Jewishness, Reich started writing his musical works and biography along the same lines. Proverb does not draw from Judaism, but it is related to spirituality in a broader sense: 13th-century sacred music and the early music movement interpretation of early sacred music.

Through these stylistic and spiritual influences in his opus, Reich’s aesthetic evolution followed the shift in its reception among renowned institutions, ensembles, and audiences. The increase of accessibility of his music brought Reich wider recognition and motivated a more nuanced understanding of his early minimalist works. Therefore, the composer’s notoriety has coincided with his and the public representation of his work.

Philip Bohlman argues that canon and discipline are ineluctably bound where the canon is the performative and discipline is the performance. He states that “canon is inevitably linked to texts, whereas discipline requires acts of deciding upon and interpreting those texts. The subsequent link is that it admits many texts—musics, for our

brought a new way of concentrated listening to the process itself becomes a postminimalist aesthetic that is based on minimalist technique but also includes other elements. These new elements bring many different possibilities of listening to Reich’s postminimalist works. These new procedures, techniques, and references in Tehillim and Proverb project the composer’s intention to connect his work with his audience. They act as communicative gestures that are convenient for a careful listening in their constant minimalist repetitiveness with a pulse. Therefore, the listener cannot lose the focus in the repetitiveness of patterns or (longer) musical phrases. Tehillim and Proverb communicate differently with the audience than Reich’s early minimalistic pieces due to a different treatment of text from Reich’s earlier opus. In these two pieces, he sets whole textual phrases and composes music that reflects the rhythm of the text in long phrases. In addition to using an approach to text setting that is common in sacred music (where the text determines the melodic and rhythmic flux), Reich specifically references Bach and Perotinus in terms of technique and the general sound of the piece. Those are all rhetorical structures of these work that include vocals, text, and references to early music ideals.

concerns—and accordingly proliferates the possibilities for parallax readings.”249 Canon reflects the cultural context through reception, social structure, and community where

“the new canons demand reflexivity and the broadening of the community.”250

Canonizers who create canons as authoritative figures in history inserted Reich into

Western classical music canon. All the institutions, scholars, record companies, and

publishers contributed to an image of Reich as one of the most important living

composers. Additionally, Reich’s self-fashioning of his music is another important

narrative created around his work.

Starting in the 1980s, rhetorical elements in Tehillim and Proverb led to a new

engagement between Reich and music critics; his music, although still in the classical

realm, became accessible to a new audience through its new communicative elements and

techniques, such as form, extensive melodies, harmony, and traditional canonic imitative

structure. Blending different musical aspects led to the wider acceptance of Reich’s

music by new generations of audiences and artists from the 1970s onwards, both in

classical (especially postminimalists) and popular music (e.g., electro, techno, dance

music). For example, one of the most appreciated festivals of popular music,

Glastonbury, hosted Reich in 2014. Reich’s reception within electro and techno

audiences began with the expansion of this music at the beginning of the 1990s. Also,

Nonesuch records published the record Reich Remixed in 1999 in collaboration with

some of the most prominent musicians in this field.251

249 Idem, 202. 250 Idem, 207-8. 251 Jonathan Bernard is one of the authors who wrote about the connection between Reich’s and popular music. In Jonathan W. Bernard, “Minimalism and Pop: influence, reaction, consequences,” in Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, eds. Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll ap Siôn (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 337-356.

Furthermore, the change in Reich’s style and aesthetics led to several

performances, recordings, and commissions of Reich’s music by major classical music

institutions, record companies, and ensembles. Consequently, Reich’s approach to his

own music further evolved, extending his reception into the 21st century. Reception of

Reich’s work in this period motivated him to start promoting his work at many different

levels (media, lectures, and writings) and led him to assume a prominent position in the

world of classical Western music. This helped expand narratives on the prominence of his

work in the context of the Western music canon.252

In a discussion on the importance of Reich’s work, in 2012, Michael Tilson

Thomas included Reich among the great American composers of the 20th century who

made a change in experimental music, proclaiming him as one of the American

Mavericks, the “voices who created a new American sound for the twentieth century and

beyond.”253 Although American Mavericks is a project that toured the United States and

has a marketing campaign, for Thomas, one of the most influential musicians in the

country, Reich represents a real maverick. In his opinion, a maverick composer is

someone who pushes boundaries, exploring new sounds by traditional and new

instruments and by using a vocabulary of electronics and computer technology. He

defines three elements related to the compositions of American Mavericks: the chamber

element, the techno element, and any element that would take music away from

252 In 1982, Time magazine published an article on minimalism “The Heart is Back in the Game.” It described minimalism as “directly emotional in its appeal, a deliberate rebuke to three decades of arid, overly intellectualized music produced by the postwar avant-garde” claiming that “Hypnotic and infectious, minimalism is emotional in its appeal.” Michael Walsh, “The Heart is Back in the Game,” Time, September 20, 1982. 253 American Mavericks, official website, accessed February 19, 2019: http://americanmavericks.org/

conventional thinking.254 Thomas’s discourse coincides with Reich’s self-positioning as a

successor in the history of counterpoint, a developer of a specific canonic technique of

phase shifting, and one of the first minimalist composers in the history of Western art

music.255

Reich started to self-fashion his position within the Western canon through

writing, lecturing, and talking about his work and by engaging with the canonic technique

in his music in a more traditional way, which led him to the early music movement and

collaborations with Paul Hillier. By referring to early music of the Western canon, a

lesser-known repertory of Western music that traditionally privileged 18th and 19th- century compositions, Reich attempts to present his work, along with Proverb, as distinctive from the work of his contemporaries.

Moreover, in 2002, Reich underlined the difficulty of his position as a student and as a minimalist composer, claiming that during the 1960s people were interested in

European serial music and John Cage. Reich emphasized that serialism and indeterminate music had “no fixed pulse, there was nothing you could tap your foot to, there was nothing you could whistle to, there was no key to hang on to.”256 He implemented all

these elements in his own music. Reich witnessed that “people who didn’t write that way

254 “Michael Tilson Thomas on what makes an American Maverick,” San Francisco Symphony, published January 3, 2012, accessed February 19, 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyOneztZGuc 255 Washington Post critic Tim Page agrees with Tilson when stating that Reich's ‘fans’ are always intrigued by every part of his opus: “One of the things that is really sort of extraordinary about Steve Reich is that he is 75, and yet he is still to whom everybody looks with great interest to see what he will do next.” “At 75, Reich is Still a Center of Attention,” NPR, published October 16, 2011, accessed February 19, 2019: https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2011/10/16/141349736/at-75-steve-reich-is-still-the- center-of-attention 256 Gabrielle Zuckerman, “An Interview with Steve Reich,” American Public Media, published July 2002, accessed February 19, 2019: http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/interview_reich.html

at that time were simply a joke; you just weren’t taken seriously.”257 Similar to other

composer’s narratives on the lack of acceptance of his minimalist work, Reich

simultaneously built narratives on his success, claiming that he was a maverick before

Michael Tilson Thomas called him one.

Reich highlights “the real success” of his work both in the popular and the

classical music worlds. In 2011 Reich added:

I think real success as a composer is measured in two ways. Number one that the musical community of players wants to play your music—they hear something that makes them want to play it—and that the general audience wants to hear it. If you have got both of those things, you are succeeding.258

Reich does not deny that his works are often performed around the world, since “there are

now hundreds of musicians around the globe… are fantastically good at phasing, playing

Different Trains, playing Music for Eighteen Musicians. But that was not the case in the

1960s and 1970s.”259 Reich’s attitude on his music’s popularity and success in the 21st century is the result of the mutual correspondence between media, American society, and institutions.260

Hence, Reich embraces the fact that minimalism is considered to be an important

movement in arts and music and a “largely American development.”261 In this context,

Reich distinguishes himself as an inventor of the phase shifting tape process. In Reich’s words, “the whole phasing idea is a footnote to the history of canon in Western music.”262

257 Ibid. 258 Tommy Pearson, “Reich on Reich,” op. cit. 259 Ibid. 260 Kyle Gann, American music in the...,” op. cit., 187. Gann states that minimalism “emerged as a mass audience phenomenon in 1974 with the releases of Reich’s Deutsche Grammophone recordings and in 1976 with the historic premiere of Glass’s Einstein on the Beach at the Metropolitan Opera House.” Ibid. 261 Timothy A. Johnson, op. cit. 742. 262 Eric Darmon & Franck Mallet, Steve Reich: Phase to Face, op. cit.

This statement reveals Reich’s attitude that his phase shifting processes are not just

marginal pieces, but compositions that bring a new technique and contribute to the well-

established history of canon. By writing about his music, and talking about early classical

Western musical influences, Reich places himself and his opus both as inheritors and

successors of a long and influential musical tradition. Delving even further into the past,

Reich’s return to Judaism was followed by his claims that Jewish cantillations are part of

the old Western music tradition, and places him as a descendant of a tradition that started

even before Perotinus and Bach.

Two significant scholars observed Reich’s ‘greatness’ in 1997, just before the

2000s and Reich’s greater self-positioning within the classical music milieu, primarily

through his claims on ‘micro’ canon and canonic technique in his opus. Writing about

Reich’s Eight Lines, Kyle Gann commented on Reich’s popularity: “The physicality of

Eight Lines’s swinging rhythm, plus the intricacy of its echoing patterns, demonstrate

why Reich has become one of the best-loved of American composers.”263Another

narrative related to Reich’s canonization comes from the prominent musicologist Richard

Taruskin, who writes:

…as far as I am concerned, Mr. Reich can go permanently astray now and never lose the distinction of having given classical music back first its youth and finally its soul in the waning years of the 20th century. It is something for which the musicians of the 21st century will remember him and be grateful. We can be grateful already.264

263 Kyle Gann, American music in the...,” op. cit., 202. 264 Taruskin, Richard. “A Sturdy Musical Bridge to the 21th Century.” New York Times (August 8, 1997). Accessed October 18, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/24/arts/a-sturdy-musical-bridge-to- the-21st-century.html (Reprinted in Richard Taruskin, The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays)

Reflecting on Different Trains, Taruskin adds: “So successful a mapping of structure and

meaning, so thorough an interpenetration of sonic material and conceptual metaphor, is

the mark of a master composer.”265 In both statements, Taruskin showed some measure

of loyalty for Reich’s work that is necessary for the establishment of canons. One of the

most prominent scholars in the field of musicology advocated for Reich which led to

Reich’s placement in the Western canon. The phrase “master composer,” attributed to

Reich by Taruskin, elevates the significance of the composer in the history of music

through ideological principles of genius. Given this and other arguments by scholars and

critics on Reich’s greatness, Reich and the canon became intertwined between writings

about him and many influences in his career.

Likewise, through Reich’s statements in the 1980s, one may notice the change in

his perception of his role in music history, as well as his aesthetics. There is a shift from

an artist-inventor who contributed to the history of music through the technique of phase

shifting to a composer who embraced the traditional approach to canon in Tehillim and

Proverb. However, although Tehillim represents a sort of aesthetic boundary from his

later works, Reich’s compositional approach changed only in the context of his

minimalist aesthetics. In other words, despite many new elements in Tehillim and

Proverb that had been transmitted to other works, both works are paradigmatic examples

of Reich’s postminimalist works that emerge on the basis of minimalist aesthetics, style,

and technique. This kind of self-referentiality only affirms the position of these works as

postminimalist but also postmodernist works. Along with their previously discussed

postmodern elements, and the significance that non-minimalist segments take in these

265 Ibid.

works, Tehillim and Proverb are postminimalist postmodern works that created a path

toward new spheres of Reich’s opus.

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