Steve Reich: Thoughts for His 50Th-Birthday Year Author(S): Keith Potter Source: the Musical Times, Vol
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Steve Reich: Thoughts for His 50th-Birthday Year Author(s): Keith Potter Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 127, No. 1715 (Jan., 1986), pp. 13-17 Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/965345 Accessed: 20/08/2009 22:50 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mtpl. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Musical Times Publications Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Musical Times. http://www.jstor.org Steve Reich Thoughts for his 50th-birthdayyear Keith Potter Steve Reich and Musicians are touring Britain in January and the Western classical tradition (not just the undirected February, on the Arts Council ContemporaryMusic Network, motion of Perotin's textures, to which Reich used to refer, appearingfirst at the Dominion Theatre,London, on 29 January; for no sophisticatedmid-20th-century Western composer their programme includes two British premieres, 'New York could be entirely unaffected by all later manifestationsof Counterpoint'and 'Sextet' as well as 'ClappingMusic', 'Vermont the that was his birthand frommodern and Part III'. heritage by training), Counterpoint' 'Drumming urban popular traditions(the tonal and rhythmic, as well Much has been made of the extent to which Reich and as the textural,approaches common to much jazzand rock), and, most of all, from non-Western Glass representa crossoverphenomenon - the replace- probably important ment of the traditionalnarrow audience for seriousmusic sources (at that time in particularthe polyrhythmicstruc- tures of West African and Indonesiangamelan by the masseswho attendpopular culture. This proposed drumming convergence of elite and mass art, which assumes the music). of a wide audience for this new What, however,makes the currentclash of culturesrefer- possibility music, red to crucial to the musicians of the founderson two observations.The music is not casually by Lipman appear danceable and it lacks It thus for its Westernclassical tradition and their audience,is, morethan lyrics. requires the recent of musicwithin appreciation a kind of sophistication no broad group anything, higherprofile repetitive So it is not that when a recent that traditionitself. In its early days, musical minimalism, possesses. surprising as Michael once out in these was Carnegie Hall benefit, sponsored by the Columbia Nyman pointed pages, 'cold-shouldered the musical establishment', just as University student radio station WKCR, featuredper- by sonal both Reich andGlass others Cage's work had been in the 1950s, he added.5Rejected appearancesby (among the bastions of'serious' musical culture - both the less well known), it attractedonly an overwhelmingly by by and affluent audience. The conclusion performingorganizations and venues of classicalmusic and white, educated, the now establishedand for the most is inescapable:Reich and Glass have lately written what by quitefirmly initially is no more than a music for an partserially-orientated vanguard of contemporary'serious' pop intellectuals, easy-to- - listen-tomusic free of the so markedin black-oriented music in Americanuniversities composerssuch as Reich rage and Glass formed their own instrumentalensembles from music and the pop culture of the 1960s.' the handfulof like-mindedcomposer-performers and other and their work to those who Transitoryor not, people like this music. For a serious sympathetic musicians took in composerin the late twentieth century, that is no mean seemedto want it: chieflyto young audiences artgalleries, achievement.2 museums and art colleges and university art departments, many of whose membersknew somethingof currentdevel- Musical syntheses are, of course, a great deal older than opments in minimalismin the fine arts, and most of whom the currently fashionableterm applied to certain of their were probablymore interested in rock music than in the present manifestations.The view, expounded by Mellers classical tradition. and Hitchcock and fruitfully pursued again more recently To some extent this still describes the audience for the by Rockwell, of music in the USA as a dialogue between music of these composers today, though the numbers are the 'cultivated' and the 'vernacular'traditions, is but one now much larger.This is particularlythe case with Glass, example of direct relevanceto my present concern.3Even who despite being signed as a 'classical' artist by CBS the early repetitive works of the so-calledminimalist com- Recordshas a considerablefollowing in the worldof popular posers like Reich can easily be interpretedas part of John music; one should not forget, though, that until recently Rockwell's 'happy babble of overlapping dialogues':4in Reich became known to many people through the record- Reich'scase a highly compellingmixture of influencesfrom ings of his music on a West Germanjazz label, ECM. The 'classical music world' and the 'new music scene' which 1 Samuel Lipman: TheHouse of Music:Art in an Era of Institutions(Boston, 1984), forms a small part of it have, though, taken a noticeably 47-8 keenerinterest in such music in the last ten yearsor so, and 2 John Rockwell:All AmericanMusic: Compositionin the Late TwentiethCentury in 122 Britain more especially in the last two or three. Glass (London, 1985), is better known in the world than and his 3 see Wilfrid Mellers: Music in a New FoundLand: Themesand Developmentsin pop Reich, own the History of AmericanMusic (London, 1965) and H. Wiley Hitchcock: Music in group has for some years now toured in the manner of a the UnitedStates: a HistoricalIntroduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 2/1974) as well as Rockwell, op cit 4 Rockwell, 4 5 in a review of Reich and Glass's first London concerts, MT, cxii (1971), 463 13 significant amount of activity among classical music pro- fessionals - includingthose composerswho feel themselves the heirs of that tradition- that suggestsa new understand- ing of this view. This sympathymight, as proponentsof modernismwould argue, sometimes be expressedwith little more coherence than most rejections of the new. It cannot, however, any longerbe denied that a sizeablenumber of composersquite aside from the older traditionalistsnow feel themselves to be in a situation in which such things as the proceduresof Westernclassical tonality must be reinvestigatedand some- how reactivated.Clearly the extent to which the music of both Reich and Glass since around 1973 or so can be inter- preted, far less ambiguously than their earlier, more minimalistcompositions, in termsof such tonal reinvestiga- tion is an importantelement in its acceptanceinto the world of classicalmusic; its explorationsof certainkinds of tonal harmonic language in the context of rhythmic repetition are also, of course, what drawsthis music closer to jazz or rock. In addition, the feeling that, as Rockwell puts it, 'we are in a new era'6has been noted elsewherein the arts over at least the last 15 years. In architecture,in dramaand in other arts, as increasingly in music too, its very real and important outlines, already difficult to perceive clearly because of their proximity to practice and resistance to theory, are furtherobscured by the frequentuse of the label 'post-modernism'. Lipman'sdiatribe, on the otherhand, proclaimsthe music of a composersuch as Reich to be opportunistand escapist, a blandthough sinister attempt to anaesthetizeany members of the classical music audience gullible enough to realize that they are being deprived of the cultural essences that justify the 'real thing'. Such music's failure to survive the criteria of does not, rock band more than a 'classical' he is now scrutiny by 'pop' unfortunately, ensemble; yet render it immune to the strictures of the classical world, most of his time to for the devoting writing operas major, as Paul Griffiths'sarticle on Glass in last June's MT makes establishedhouses. Reich more within operates exclusively clear.7 We come here, of course, full circle in more than the world of'classical music', as his tour this month under one sense:not to an inevitablerecourse to the 'modern- the of the ArtsCouncil's Music Net- only auspices Contemporary ist' versus 'post-modernist'debate, but also to an uneasy work makes clear; and while Glass has been taken up by conclusionthat no truly 'crossover'cultural mixture is ever the Europeanopera houses, Reich has been commissioned to validfare in eitherthe of one source and the likely prove fryingpan performedby Europeanbroadcasting organizations or the fire of