Rethinking Reich

Rethinking Reich
EDITED BY
Sumanth Gopinath
Pwyll ap Siôn

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gopinath, Sumanth S. | Pwyll ap Siôn.
Title: Rethinking Reich / edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018041188 | ISBN 9780190605285 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780190605292 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Reich, Steve, 1936—Criticism and interpretation. |
Minimal music—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC ML410.R27 R47 2019 | DDC 780.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018041188

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
To Beth and Nia, and dedicated to John Thomas Becker (1986–2017) and
Dafydd Tomos Dafis (1958–2017)—two close friends who were also very talented
musicians. They will be missed.
Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Copyright Permissions xi
List of Contributors xv

Introduction: Reich in Context 1
Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn

I Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

1 “Departing to Other Spheres”: Psychedelic Science Fiction,

Perspectival Embodiment, and the Hermeneutics of
Steve Reich’s Four Organs 19
Sumanth Gopinath
2 “Moving Forward, Looking Back”: Resulting Patterns, Extended
Melodies, Eight Lines, and the influence of the West on Steve Reich 53
Pwyll ap Siôn
3 Different Tracks: Narrative Sequence, Harmonic (Dis)continuity,
and Structural Organization in Steve Reich’s Different Trains
and The Cave 75
Maarten Beirens
4 “We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece”: The Reconciliatory
Aesthetic of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s The Cave 93
Ryan Ebright

II Repetition, Speech, and Identity

5 Repetition, Speech, and Authority in Steve Reich’s “Jewish” Music 113

Robert Fink
6 Steve Reich’s Dramatic Sound Collage for the Harlem Six: Toward a
Prehistory of Come Out 139
John Pymm

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viii Contents

7. From World War II to the “War on Terror”: An Examination of Steve

Reich’s “Docu-Music” Approach in WTC 9/11 159
Celia Casey

III Reich Revisited: Sketch Studies

8 “Save as . . . »”: Hybrid Resources in the Steve Reich Collection 179

Matthias Kassel
9 Sketching a New Tonality: A Preliminary Assessment of Steve
Reich’s Sketches for Music for 18 Musicians in Telling the Story
of This Work’s Approach to Tonality 191
Keith Potter
10 Improvisation, Two Variations on a Watermelon, and a New
Timeline for Piano Phase 217
David Chapman
11 Steve Reich’s Counterpoints and Computers: Rethinking the 1980s 239
Twila Bakker

IV Beyond the West: Africa and Asia

12 Afro-Electric Counterpoint 259

Martin Scherzinger
13 That’s All It Does: Steve Reich and Balinese Gamelan 303
Michael Tenzer
14 “Machine Fantasies into Human Events”: Reich and
Technology in the 1970s 323
Kerry O’Brien

Works Cited 345

Index 369
Acknowledgments

The two editors of this volume would like to thank the following:

The Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, and all the scholars and staff there, especially
Matthias Kassel (curator of the Steve Reich collection), Tina Kilvio Tüscher, and
Isolde Degen; Oxford University Press, especially Suzanne Ryan, who provided
much-needed guidance, advice, and encouragement from our initial, tenta-
tive proposals to the final publication; also Vika Kouznetsov, Lauralee Yeary,
Jamie Kim, Adam Cohen, Dan Gibney, Eden Piacitelli and all those at Oxford
University Press who have assisted with copyediting and indexing; Christina
Nisha Paul (Project Manager for Newgen Knowledge Works), Sangeetha
Vishwanthan, Susan Ecklund, and Pilar Wyman; Janis Susskind, Mike Williams
and Tyler Rubin at Boosey & Hawkes; Katie Havelock and Matthew Rankin
at Nonesuch Records; Livia Necasova at Universal Edition; Philip Rupprecht,
Laura Tunbridge, and Marianne Wheeldon, as editors of previous volumes in
the Rethinking series for readily sharing valuable advice; Lynda Corey Claassen
(Director of Special Collections & Archives at UC San Diego Library), Shelley
Freeman; Josh Rutter for his willingness to participate in this project and his
contributions to it.
The editors also wish to thank all the contributors to this volume for their
willingness to respond to requests for changes, corrections and additions; and
for their patience throughout the publication process.

Sumanth Gopinath wishes to thank friends and family, especially his partner
Beth, his parents, Sudhir and Madhura, and his brother, Shamin, for their un-
wavering support and love; Pat McCreless, Michael Veal, Michael Denning,
Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, Robert Morgan, Jim Hepokoski, John MacKay, Greg
Dubinsky, Michael Friedmann, Matthew Suttor, and other faculty members
who were important influences on his work on Reich while in graduate
school; Beth Hartman, Robert Adlington, Jonathan Bernard, Trevor Bača, Seth
Brodsky, Thomas Campbell, Michael Cherlin, Eva R. Cohen, James Dillon,
Eric Drott, Gabrielle Gopinath, Ted Gordon, Russell Hartenberger, Michael
Klein, Matthew McDonald, Leta Miller, Ian Quinn, Rob Slifkin, Jason Stanyek,
Vic Szabo, his co-editor and all of the contributors to this volume, all grad-
uate students participating in his “Musical Minimalisms” seminar between
2005 and 2018, his colleagues in the music theory division (Matt Bribitzer-Stull,
David Damschroder, and Bruce Quaglia) and School of Music at the University
of Minnesota, and many other interlocutors on Reich and minimalism over

ix
x Acknowledgments

the years, for their innumerable insights; the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, for
a fellowship to study there for a month in August 2015; and the University of
Minnesota, for a research grant from the Imagine Fund.

Pwyll ap Siôn wishes to thank friends and family, especially his partner Nia; his
parents Morwen and John; Tomos and Osian, staff and colleagues at the School
of Music, Bangor University; doctoral students who helped in various ways with
this publication, especially Twila Bakker and Tristian Evans; Bangor University
for granting a period of research leave during 2015–16; the British Academy for
the award of a Small Research Grant in 2014–15 to visit the Paul Sacher Stiftung,
Basel; the Leverhulme Trust for the award of a Research Fellowship in 2016–
17 to carry out further research on the music of Steve Reich, especially Anna
Grundy; Nikki Morgan and Martin Rigby for providing English translations to
German texts; Rafael Prado and the Fundación BBVA in Madrid; and belated
thanks to Bryony Dawkes for the Grainger excerpts.
Copyright Permissions

The following figures, tables and examples have been reproduced with kind
permission from the Steve Reich Collection, Paul Sacher Foundation (PSS), Basel
Figure  1.1 An approximate transcription of Reich’s sketchbook doodle,
August 14, 1969, Sketchbook [1].
Table  3.1 List of harmonies attributed to each scene of act 2 of The Cave,
transcribed from the composer’s Sketchbook [42].
Example 3.1 Speech melodies in The Cave from the first Hagar scene, act 1 (1993
version).
Example  3.2 Sample and harmonies from The Cave, act 1 (“Isaac” scene) as
notated in Reich’s sketchbook, Sketchbook [41].
Example 4.1 Transcription of entry dated July 22, 1990, in Sketchbook [41].
Table 4.2 Fragment from “Abraham & Nimrod” computer document.
Table  6.1 Arrangement of tape transcription, sourced from SR CD-3 Track 5
entitled Harlem’s Six Condemned.
Table 7.1 Steve Reich’s list of interview questions for WTC 9/11 (2010).
Example 7.1 Compositional sketch dated “7/28/10”.
Figure 8.1 Steve Reich, Different Trains (1988), screenshot of the folder structure
in list form.
Figure 8.2 Steve Reich, Different Trains (1988), screenshot of the folder structure
in expanded list form.
Example  9.1 February 1, 1989:  untitled sketch for Music for 18 Musicians,
recopying of “cycle of 11 chords,” dated “2/1/89,” Sketchbook [39], whole page.
Example  9.2 February 20, 1975:  “Work in Progress for  .  .  .  18 Musicians,”
ten pulsing chords, treble only, dated “2/20/75,” Sketchbook [15], first two
staves only.
Example  9.3 March 14, 1975:  “Opening Pulse—revision & expansion,” dated
“March 14,” Sketchbook [15].
Example  9.4 April 28, 1974:  untitled sketch for pulse and oscillating chords,
dated “4/28” Sketchbook [13] whole page.

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xii Copyright Permissions

Example  9.5 December 4, 1974:  untitled sketch for a sequence of four-part

chords, on page dated both “12/2” and “12/4” Sketchbook [14] whole page.
Example 10.2 Transcribed selection from Reich’s first Variation on a Watermelon
(digitized archival recording of March 19, 1967 performance at Park Place
Gallery).
Table 10.3 Fairleigh-Dickinson University Program, January 5, 1967, in folder
“Programme Jan 1967”.
Chapter 10, Appendix 1 Transcription of the March 1967 Performance of the
second Variation on a Watermelon (digitized archival recording of March 19,
1967 performance at Park Place Gallery).
Chapter 10, Appendix 2 The Piano Phase improvisation, January 1967 (digitized
archival recording of January 5, 1967, performance at Fairleigh-Dickinson
University Art Gallery).
Table 11.2 Comparison of select early Electric Counterpoint computer files.
Figure 12.1 Reich’s sketch for Clapping Music and Music for Pieces of Wood.
Example 12.12 Transcription of Reich’s final sketch for Electric Counterpoint.
Table 13.1 List of recordings of Balinese gamelan in Reich’s collection.
Example 14.1 Reich’s Four Log Drums, mm. 4–5.
Example 14.2 Music for 18 Musicians manuscript [2/10], p. 1, mm. 1–8.
Example 14.3 Music for 18 Musicians manuscript [2/10], p. 84, mm. 577–82.
All text references, transcriptions of (or from) interviews taken from sources kept
at the Steve Reich Collection, including the composer’s own comments and/or
annotations, have been used with permission from the Paul Sacher Foundation.

Copyright permissions from other sources:

Front Cover: Steve Reich during a rehearsal of Music for 18 Musicians, New York,

March 1976. Photograph by Betty Freeman © Copyright Shelley Freeman (with
thanks to Lynda Corey Claassen, Director of Special Collections & Archives,
Mandeville Special Collections, UC San Diego Library, and Matthias Kassel at
the Paul Sacher Stiftung).
Example 1.4 Reduction of Four Organs, m. 11. © Copyright 1980 by Universal
Edition (London) Ltd., London/UE16183. Reproduced by permission.
Example  2.2 Flute melody and piano 1 part in Eight Lines, rehearsal 74A ©
Copyright 1980 Hendon Music, Inc., a Boosey & Hawkes company. Reproduced
by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.
Copyright Permissions xiii

Example  2.4 Extended melody in flute in opening section of Eight Lines,

rehearsal 11. © Copyright 1980 Hendon Music, Inc., a Boosey & Hawkes
company. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music
Publishers Ltd.
Example  5.1 Reich, The Cave, act 1, scene 1, mm. 10–30. The Cave by Steve
Reich and Beryl Korot © Copyright 1993 by Hendon Music, Inc., a Boosey
& Hawkes company. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music
Publishers Ltd.
Example 5.2 Reich, The Cave, act 1, scene 7, mm. 1–16. The Cave by Steve Reich
and Beryl Korot © Copyright 1993 by Hendon Music, Inc., a Boosey & Hawkes
company. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.
Figure  10.1 Reich demonstrating the “stacked-hand” disposition in Piano
Phase (source: Steve Reich: Phase to Face, dir. Éric Darmon and Frank Mallet).
Illustration by Stephanie Fitzgerald. Used with permission.
Figure  14.1 Four Log Drums at the Whitney Museum of American Art
(May 27, 1969). Photograph © Richard Landry
Figure  14.2 An image from the documentary Wasserpfeifen in New  York:
Musikalische Avantgarde zwischen Ideologie und Elektronik [45:46] (reproduced
in New Music:  Sounds and Voices from the Avant-Garde [44:32]). © Michael
Blackwood Productions Inc.

The format for indicating minutes and seconds in this volume is as follows: 04:33
Contributors

Pwyll ap Siôn is Professor of Music at Bangor University, Wales. His publications

include The Music of Michael Nyman (2007) and Michael Nyman:  Collected
Writings. He coedited The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and
Postminimalist Music (2013) with Keith Potter and Kyle Gann, and has
contributed articles and reviews to Contemporary Music Review, Twentieth-
Century Music, and Performance Practice Review. In 2016, he received a
Leverhulme Research Fellowship to focus on the music of Steve Reich. He also
contributes regularly to Gramophone music magazine.
Twila Bakker completed her doctorate in musicology at Bangor University,
Wales, in 2016, focusing on Steve Reich’s Counterpoint pieces. Her current re-
search, supported by a 2018 Paul Sacher Foundation research grant, addresses
digital sketch studies utilizing Reich’s compositional output as a case study.
Bakker is a committee member of the Society for Minimalist Music and holds
previous degrees in music and history from the University of Victoria and the
University of Alberta, Canada.
Maarten Beirens studied musicology at the Catholic University of Leuven
(KU Leuven), Belgium, where he was awarded a PhD in 2005 for his thesis on
European minimal music. He then held a postdoctoral fellowship awarded by
FWO Flanders at KU Leuven, conducting research on the music of Steve Reich,
before being appointed lecturer in musicology at the University of Amsterdam.
He contributed a chapter to The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and
Postminimalist Music (2013). Other publications have appeared in the Revue
Belge de Musicologie, Tempo, and Contemporary Music Review.
Celia Casey submitted her doctorate in musicology at the University of
Queensland, Australia, in 2018, researching the creative process in Steve Reich’s
speech works. Prior to this, her first-class honors thesis investigated aspects
of Erik Satie’s contribution to conceptual art. Her research has benefited from
interviews with Reich and from the support of a Paul Sacher Foundation re-
search grant and travel awards from the University of Queensland, allowing sev-
eral visits to the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, to undertake sketch studies. She
has performed widely as a cellist and vocalist and is currently employed by the
Queensland Symphony Orchestra.
David Chapman is Assistant Professor of Music at Rose-Hulman Institute of
Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he teaches music history and theory
to engineers, mathematicians, and scientists. His research focuses primarily

xv
xvi Contributors

on the role of performance, improvisation, and ensembles in the downtown

New York avant-garde music scene of the 1960s and 1970s. He holds degrees
in piano performance and in musicology from Kennesaw State University,
Georgia, and the University of Georgia, respectively. He received his PhD from
Washington University in St. Louis in 2013 for a thesis on Philip Glass and the
downtown New York scene between 1966 and 1976.
Ryan Ebright serves as an Instructor of Musicology at Bowling Green State
University. He earned his PhD in musicology at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill in 2014 and holds a masters’ degree in musicology and vocal
performance from the Peabody Conservatory. His research includes music for
the voice, stage, and screen, with an emphasis on contemporary opera, min-
imalism, and nineteenth-century lieder, and has been published in American
Music, Notes, and the online publication on contemporary music NewMusicBox.
Robert Fink is Professor of Musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of
Music and author of Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural
Practice (2005). His publications on minimalism and repetition, popular music,
the fate of the classical canon, and problems of musical analysis have appeared
in Rethinking Music (1999), Beyond Structural Listening? (2004), and The
Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (2013),
and in journals including Cambridge Opera Journal, Journal of the American
Musicological Society, and American Music. Along with Cecilia Sun, he is the
collator of Oxford Bibliographies Online’s substantial entry on “Minimalism.”
Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of
Minnesota. He is the author of The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural
Form (2013) and coeditor, with Jason Stanyek, of The Oxford Handbook of Mobile
Music Studies (2014). His research ranges widely from Steve Reich and musical
minimalism to Marxism and music scholarship, sound and digital media, Bob
Dylan, Benjamin Britten, the aesthetics of smoothness, and the music of con-
temporary Scottish composer James Dillon.
Matthias Kassel studied musicology and German language and literature in
Freiburg im Breisgau. He has been a curator at the Paul Sacher Foundation,
Basel, since 1995. His publications and articles focus mainly on composers’
collections in the archive. Recent interests include the work of Mauricio Kagel,
and the Steve Reich collection, as well as the performance practice and archival
aspects of new music.
Kerry O’Brien is an Instructor at the Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle. She
received her PhD from Indiana University in 2018, having written a disserta-
tion on the history of the arts organization Experiments in Art and Technology
(E.A.T.), 1966–1971, which includes a chapter on Steve Reich. Her work on
postwar experimentalism, minimalism, and countercultural spirituality has
Contributors xvii

been supported by a Presser Music Award, a Paul Sacher Foundation research

grant, a Getty research library grant, and an American Fellowship from the
American Association of University Women. Her research has been published
in the Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung and NewMusicBox, and in articles in
the New York Times and the New Yorker online.
Keith Potter is Professor of Music at Goldsmiths, University of London. Active
as both musicologist and music journalist, he was for many years chief editor of
Contact: A Journal of Contemporary Music, the thirty-four issues of which will be
republished online in 2019. For a decade, he was a regular music critic for The
Independent daily newspaper. A founding committee member of the Society for
Minimalist Music, he was its Chair from 2011 to 2013. His publications include
Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass
(2000) and The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist
Music (2013), coedited with Kyle Gann and Pwyll ap Siôn. Recent publications on
Reich, arising from research carried out at the Steve Reich archive at the Paul Sacher
Foundation, Basel, have appeared in Tonality since 1950 (2017) and Contemporary
Music Review (2018); and the outcome of collaborative projects on musical per-
ception and cognition, involving music by Glass as well as Reich, appeared in
Music and/as Process (2016) and the journal Time and Time Perception.
John Pymm is Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Wolverhampton.
He is a founding member of the Society for Minimalist Music and was elected
three times as the Society’s President between 2013 and 2017. He has given nu-
merous international conference papers on the music of Steve Reich, based on
archival research carried out at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, contributing
a chapter to The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist
Music (2013). He received his PhD from the University of Southampton in 2013.
Martin Scherzinger is Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication
at New York University. His research focuses on the relationship between sound,
music, media, and politics, and his work has appeared in publications including
Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought (2002), Beyond Structural Listening?
(2004), and The World of South African Music:  A Reader (2005) and in the
journals Current Musicology, Perspectives of New Music, and Cultural Critique.
Michael Tenzer is a performer, composer, scholar, and teacher. He has been
active in the international proliferation of gamelan music since 1977, under-
taking years of fieldwork in Indonesia and cofounding Gamelan Sekar Jaya in
Berkeley in 1979. He was the first non-Balinese composer to create new works
for Balinese ensembles in Bali. His book Gamelan Gong Kebyar:  The Art of
Twentieth Century Balinese Music (2000) received the Alan P. Merriam Prize of
the Society for Ethnomusicology and the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. He has
a PhD in music composition from UC Berkeley and has been Professor of Music
at the University of British Columbia since 1996.
Rethinking Reich
Introduction
Reich in Context

Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn

Now we were home again, sitting among the colors of the living room.
I started to put Van Morrison on, and she said, “Hey, have you ever heard
Steve Reich?”
I told her no. I told her I’d been living outside the music zone, catching
whatever happened to blow through. She said, “I’m going to put him on
right now.” And she did.
Steve Reich’s music proved to be a pulse, with tiny variations. It was
the kind of electronic music that doesn’t come from instruments—that
seems made up of freeze-dried interludes of vibrating air. Steve Reich was
like someone serenely stuttering, never getting the first word out and not
caring if he did. You had to work to get the point of him, but then you got
it and saw the simple beauty of what he was doing—the lovely unhurried
sameness of it. It reminded me of my adult days in Cleveland, those little
variations laid over an ancient luxury of replication.1

The narrator in this passage from Michael Cunningham’s novel A Home at

the End of the World (1990) is Bobby Morrow, a young baker from Cleveland.
Bobby has recently moved in with Jonathan Glover, his gay childhood friend,
and Jonathan’s female roommate, Claire, who are living in the East Village in
Manhattan during the early 1980s—“the dead center of the Reagan years.”2
A  knowledgeable and passionate rock listener, Bobby is soon introduced to
Reich’s music by Claire, who provides him with a cultural education and, even-
tually, a sexual one. The eventual outcome is an asymmetrical, bisexual ménage
à trois between the three main characters and the resulting, unconventional
family household, which devolves by the end of the novel.
Music was central to the novel’s creation, and rock songs and references to
them are threaded through it, performing a certain affective immediacy. For
Cunningham, rock music “insists that our loneliness and confusion, our wild
nights and our love affairs gone wrong, are significant subjects, worthy of guitar
riffs and drum solos. As a writer, I’ve tried to put a measure of that reckless gen-
erosity onto the printed page.”3 Reich’s music is, in contrast, not as self-evident
to its fictional listeners, for one had to “work to get the point.” The music is not

1
2 Introduction

only reminiscent of Bobby’s inertial existence in Cleveland; it is also a part of his

makeover by Claire into a cosmopolitan New Yorker. In the novel, Reich effec-
tively acts as a sign within a tiny community, a pair of downtown Manhattanites
on the margins of art worlds—Jonathan is a food critic for a successful weekly
news publication, Claire is a trust-funded bohemian jeweler and was formerly
married to a touring dancer. Their tastes crisscross the brow spectrum: in addi-
tion to being music aficionados, they attend parties, plays, and especially film
screenings at various theaters, and they frequent dive bars and hole-in-the-wall
restaurants (because of Jonathan’s work) and watch TV together, when Jonathan
isn’t seeing his lover, Erich. Reich’s music accompanies many other cultural
products and forms that bind Bobby to this new household, the wider milieu
of downtown Manhattan, and, ultimately, the familial arrangement between the
three characters that will soon emerge—three interconnected characters raising
a baby in remote, symbolically-charged Woodstock.
Music scholars may well wonder which Reich piece is being referenced here.
The description “a pulse, with tiny variations” recalls the opening and closing
“Pulses” sections of Music for 18 Musicians (1976). The 1978 ECM LP recording
of that piece famously sold more than one hundred thousand copies within a
year of its release, making this crossover hit the most likely possibility. And yet,
the descriptions of the music as “electronic [sic]” and the composer as “serenely
stuttering” are perhaps more reminiscent of Reich’s tape pieces It’s Gonna Rain
(1965) and especially Come Out (1966), both released on LP by Columbia in the
late 1960s, and also of their “sampling” techniques to which Reich would return
later that decade, beginning with Different Trains (1988).4
But perhaps the most telling word in Cunningham’s description is one of the
most banal: “variations.” The term is a marker of what one might think of as
Reich’s turn toward more conventional forms and musical forces (commissioned
solo compositions, works for full orchestra, choral pieces). It first appears in
Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards (1979) and then resurfaces in a trio
of post–video opera compositions written in the first decade of the twentieth
century:  You Are (Variations) (2004), Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings
(2005), and the Daniel Variations (2006). While Cunningham’s description—
“little variations laid over an ancient luxury of replication”—might sound like
a characterization of music with a more ambient sensibility than Reich’s, “vari-
ations” indexes a more traditional temporality, of longer phrases and lines that
are then subjected to transformation, perhaps in the manner of a theme and var-
iations.5 Reading against the grain of Cunningham’s rock-based understanding
of Reich, we can appreciate that a new traditionalism emerges with the onset of
this period of the composer’s music, including the composer’s own rediscovery
of text-setting and extended melodic composition in Tehillim (1981). That tra-
ditionalism resonates with his own description of the “conservative 1980s,” to
which he bade farewell by the end of the decade and to which he seemingly
returned after his last video opera with Beryl Korot, Three Tales (2002).6
Introduction 3

In retrospect, what we might call Reich’s “long 1980s”—beginning in the late

1970s, after his post–Music for 18 Musicians crisis, when he considered giving
up composition and becoming a rabbi7—launched him on a path toward le-
gitimacy in the world of mainstream classical music. Indeed, it was during the
“dead center” of the Reagan/Thatcher era that Reich firmly established himself
as one of the most important composers of the late twentieth century. Claims
such as “America’s greatest living composer,” or accolades that placed him as one
of “a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the
direction of musical history,”8 were still some way off (after all, Reich would only
turn fifty during the decade), but his music was spreading much farther outside
rather than within degree programs in music departments and schools, where
undergraduates’ staple diet of the Three Bs (and the canon more broadly) would
be supplemented by contemporary modernist music—Berio, Boulez, Babbitt, or
Birtwistle, perhaps. In fact, one was more likely to hear strains of Music for 18
Musicians or Tehillim emerging from the room of a philosophy, art history, or
English literature student—a relaxing sonic technology of the self-applied long
after the day’s classes had finished, and not as the object of analytical or histor-
ical study within the classroom.
Even during the 1980s, Reich’s music was still only grudgingly accepted by
many members of the music “establishment.” Other than the ubiquitous Clapping
Music (1972), or occasionally Music for Pieces of Wood (1973), which also re-
quired limited instrumental resources, his music remained rarely performed.
One usually had to get to New York or London to hear performances of true
quality, or hope that the composer and his ensemble would make a rare visit to
town, which was, of course, more likely in the United States. Even performers of
contemporary repertoire were reluctant to embrace his music, put off perhaps
by its rhythmic demands and austere aesthetic challenges.
There were even slimmer pickings for those who wished to research it.
A  stubborn view remained that music of the so-called minimalist school of
composers—into which Reich had been unwittingly (and unwillingly) co-
opted—resisted standard forms of analysis. After all, what hidden mysteries
could be revealed in an aesthetic that was so self-reflexively transparent?
A  music that, according to the composer himself, possessed no “secrets of
structure that you can’t hear”?9 Of course, Reich’s music did, in fact, possess
“secrets of structure,” as visibly demonstrated in Paul Epstein’s revelatory anal-
ysis of the phase relationships in the first section of Piano Phase, published in
Musical Quarterly in 1986.10 K. Robert Schwarz’s nuanced two-part introduc-
tion to Reich had appeared in the pages of Perspectives of New Music some six
years previously,11 followed a few years later by the English-language translation
of Wim Mertens’s influential American Minimal Music: La Monte Young, Terry
Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass,12 but on the whole it was left to music critics to
weigh up the merits of Reich’s works in their weekly dispatches, where opinions
veered from knowledgeable (Tom Johnson), supportive (Alan Rich), or both
4 Introduction

(Kyle Gann), to dismissive and hostile (Donal Henahan, Harold C. Schonberg).

No wonder Reich himself became deeply suspicious of critics and their motives.
Still, Epstein’s article opened the door for a generation of academics who
were interested in studying Reich’s music. It also marked one of the first attempts
to rethink the nature and scope of the composer’s oeuvre—to delve beneath its
outer surface in order to examine and uncover what was going on underneath,
or even to demonstrate that there was something underneath that surface to
uncover in the first place. Other articles from around the same time, including
Dan Warburton’s “A Working Terminology for Minimal Music,”13 added fur-
ther weight to the argument that minimalist music deserved scholarly study,
while others around this time looked to draw parallels between Reich’s music
and broader concerns, such as Rob Cowan’s short but insightful article on Reich
and Wittgenstein.14
It was only during the 1990s that minimalist musicology in general, and Reich’s
music in particular, fully gathered pace, however. Publications proliferated as
the decade (and century) drew to a close, and during the intervening years the
scope of Reich studies has extended to include everything from beat-class set
and information-dynamic analysis to race, gender, desire creation, and mood
regulation.15 Out of this welter of scholarly activity three main strands have
emerged. The first remains more consolidatory in approach, building and devel-
oping on primary research conducted throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Edward
Strickland’s Minimalism:Origins, published in 1993, was the first in-depth ac-
count of the movement in relation to both the fine arts and music. This was
soon followed by K. Robert Schwarz’s Minimalists, which offered an extended
treatment of Reich’s “minimalist” and “maximalist” periods. Keith Potter’s Four
Musical Minimalists:  La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass,16
published in 2000, bore the fruits of more than twenty years of dedicated and
detailed research, immediately establishing itself as the area’s authoritative text-
book. The second strand treats minimalist music, including Reich’s, as a topic
of involved analytical and theoretical study, often drawing on various forms of
mathematics and examining rhythmic-structural features of which the com-
poser himself was almost certainly unaware. This was the argument of Richard
Cohn in his pathbreaking essay, “Transpositional Combination of Beat-Class
Sets in Steve Reich’s Phase-Shifting Music” (1992).17 In contrast to the previous
two strands, the third drew inspiration from the “new musicology” of Susan
McClary, Ruth Solie, Lawrence Kramer, and others. Like the second strand, it
sought to understand Reich’s music less, perhaps, in relation to what the com-
poser was stating, but unlike both other strands, it prioritized the rich layers
of meaning and signifying potential the composer’s music offers to interested
listeners.
One early example of the third scholarly tendency was Robert Fink’s “Going
Flat: Post-hierarchical Music Theory and the Musical Surface,” which provided
the would-be researcher with new tools for analyzing twentieth-century music,
including minimalism. Like Epstein some ten years previously, Fink also looked
Introduction 5

to Piano Phase. However, this time the piece was used to support an argument
that revolved around questions relating to the relevance and usefulness of es-
tablished analytical methods, with their emphasis on hierarchical structures,
linear descents, levels of contrapuntal stratification, and implied distinction be-
tween surface and depth. Such methods did not hold sway when it came to
analyzing minimalist works like Reich’s piece, which served as an object lesson
on the problem of musical analysis in general: “The virtual coincidence of back-
ground and foreground progressions makes the voice-leading structure of Piano
Phase almost totally non-hierarchic, totally flat. The backdrop has become the
curtain.”18
Fink’s “Going Flat” appeared in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist’s ed-
ited volume, Rethinking Music, which could be said to have set in motion
Oxford University Press’s “rethinking” quasi-series. Whether stated or im-
plied, much of what is contained in this latest collection in the series is in-
formed by developments in musicology that took place around this time. By
the early twenty-first century, the rate of productivity in Reich studies merited
a biobibliography by David J. Hoek (2002), which included an annotated list
of publications in English, French, German, and Italian. Hoek’s book certainly
offered an important snapshot of the then current state of research on Reich, but
one imagines that it would now be at least twice its original size were it updated
to include research completed in the following seventeen years, from doctoral
dissertations to journal articles, many of which appear in the works cited at the
end of this volume. However, pace the composer’s own Writings on Music, 1965–
2000, edited by Paul Hillier, only one book-length account focusing entirely on
Reich’s music has been produced to date.19 This volume attempts to redress this
imbalance.
It remains true that practice often precedes theory, and musicology
represents only one area where Reich’s music has been rethought, reappraised,
and reinterpreted. True, his music has always connected beyond the concert hall
and lecture theater, but few would have predicted back in the 1970s or 1980s the
extent to which it has penetrated aspects of today’s media and popular culture.
Reich is now frequently heard on television and film, in dramatic contexts and
situations that might shock and intrigue the composer and regular listeners of
his music.20 To take three examples, we first return to the Cunningham pas-
sage discussed earlier, but as it appears in the 2004 film version of A Home at
the End of the World. In the film, Claire (played by Robin Wright) puts on the
Reich recording, and she and Bobby (Colin Farrell) hear section VI of Music
for 18 Musicians. After about ten seconds of a medium close-up shot of Bobby
reacting to the music, the film dissolves to another scene in which Jonathan
(Dallas Roberts) is walking home, on the sidewalk. He passes a man who is
walking his dog, and both cross in front of a third man sitting on a stoop.
The two walking men make measured, balletic turns back toward each other
and stare—they are checking each other out—while the seated man watches
Jonathan. Having transformed from diegetic to nondiegetic music, the pulsating
6 Introduction

maracas, the syncopated F♯ minor groove, and especially the throbbing chordal
piano parts21 of Reich’s composition here animate and express the queer sexual
desire represented in the scene, which prefigures the erotic undercurrents that
will affect the lives of the three principal characters and hints at the histories
of promiscuity and lack of exercising “bodily precautions” that will result in
Jonathan’s contraction of AIDS.22
A second example is found in a scene from episode 9 of the third series of
British teen drama series Skins, first aired in 2009, in which the opening pulses
from Music for 18 Musicians play underneath a heated argument between twin
sisters Katie and Emily (Megan and Kathryn Prescott) about each other’s sexual
identity and inability to form and sustain long-term relationships. The music
ends suddenly during the following scene when Naomi, Emily’s onetime girl-
friend, arrives at the sisters’ house. On the surface, the music signifies the “passing
of time,” acting as a transition from one scene to the next, but on a deeper level
it implies something more:  the tangled internal thoughts of Katie and Emily
and their ongoing psychological battle. Each chordal repetition—signifying its
original and copy, statement and duplication—emphasizes the siblings’ struggle
and sense of striving for identity (made even more obvious at the beginning of
the episode when Emily goes to college disguised as her sister), as the two are
again confronted by mirror opposites of themselves, both strangely familiar yet
irreducibly different. The music’s continuous weave of interlocking patterns also
adds to the scene’s physical and psychological entanglement.
The third example, from the initial chase and fight scene in the main event
of The Hunger Games (2012), also uses Reich’s trademark pulsing technique,
this time from the opening of his Three Movements for orchestra. As the games
officially begin, the heroine, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), observes
the combatants around her fighting and killing one another, while others at-
tempt to grab supplies before fleeing. The nondiegetic music is initially sparse: it
consists of a few ringing tones—carefully sculpted sonorities reminiscent of
bowed cymbals or the decay of a rung bell. The pulses enter only once Katniss’s
adrenaline kicks in, and she gets into a kind of survival-mode “flow” state, doing
what she can to stay alive, gain valuable resources, and escape the bloodcurdling
slaughter taking place around her. The scene presents a clearly dysphoric use
of the composer’s music and thus makes one think about the disquieting and
discomfiting pulses in that piece, or others, such as the openings of the closely
related Sextet (1985) and the comparable large-scale composition The Desert
Music (1984). It also suggests a sense of altered time consciousness, in which
time both slows down and speeds up for the characters at that moment, and
hence links up with the extensive meditations—including Reich’s own—on the
perception of temporality in minimalism.23
Both examples tap into the dark undertow of Reich’s harmonic language,
going against more common employments of his music that emphasize ec-
static or pleasurable modes, especially those of advertisements or film scores
Introduction 7

that often imitate his pulsing technique. They also connect with broader
tendencies in recent Hollywood cinema to employ postminimalist styles to
signal modalities of mourning, profundity, closure, sublimity, and (in the case
of spiritual minimalism) enlightenment and transcendence.24 Indeed, both indi-
cate more complex and varied responses to Reich’s work in general, as shown in
projects such as Reich Remixed, released in 1999, which features arrangements
of the composer’s back catalog by electronic dance music producers such as DJ
Spooky and Coldcut, and the composer’s more recent Radio Rewrite, which
takes preexisting material from two songs by British rock group Radiohead as
its starting point.
* * *
You had to work to get the point of him. Cunningham’s words—as Bobby’s—
at the opening of this introduction also offer an opportunity to reflect on the
contributions in this volume. At second glance, those words remind us that
Reich’s music is, ultimately, not easy-listening fare, irrespective of how it can
be used or of its partly meditative affordances. One thinks of Michael Tilson
Thomas’s infamous statement prior to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s first
performance of Four Organs in 1971: “it’s a piece . . . for virtuoso listeners.”25
Indeed, and taking Bobby’s formulation as a cue, we should consider the work
(labor, methodology, sources/materials) involved in understanding the point
(meaning, purpose, ideas, goal) of Reich’s music, as gleaned by any individual
listener, virtuoso or not.
With respect to its “point,” we want to underscore that the composer’s music
cannot be reduced to single, simple meanings or be used in uniform and wholly
consistent ways, as the filmic and televisual repurposings discussed here clearly
illustrate. That is, there isn’t just one point. In the chapters that follow, a variety
of perspectives and purposes can be found, ranging from those drawing on crit-
ical musicological standpoints (to which we alluded earlier) to more traditional
efforts to reconstruct aspects of the composer’s creative process. All of these
perspectives are welcome and vitally important, for they contribute a wealth of
knowledge and learning that complements Reich’s own. This is crucial, not only
because Reich is the most critically esteemed composer emerging from the min-
imalist tendency but also because he is minimalism’s most authoritative theorist,
as well as one of the most lucid writers about his own work (widely apparent
since the publication of his Writings about Music in 1974, a collection of essays
that was later republished as part of a larger collection in 2002 called Writings
on Music, 1965–2000).26 His landmark text “Music as a Gradual Process” (1968)
is an eloquent and persuasive quasi-manifesto that has, often wrongly, come to
stand in as a descriptor of the entire practice of musical minimalism, and his no-
nonsense accounts of his compositions and comments in published interviews
leave the reader with the impression that little, if anything, remains to be said
about his music.
8 Introduction

Nothing could be further from the truth. As many of the chapters in this book
demonstrate, the gap between Reich’s discourse and his practice is sometimes ex-
tensive, and at times his words can obfuscate more complex realities and conten-
tious ideologies that lie under the surface of his music. Of course, many artists
develop idiosyncratic rationales for their creative practices and often feel the need
to conceal aspects of their work and personal lives, in order to maintain their pri-
vacy, confirm their stature, and reinforce or advance their position within the cul-
tural field; as Walter Benjamin famously (and hyperbolically) noted of Goethe, “To
wish to gain an understanding of [his novel] Elective Affinities from the author’s
own words on the subject is wasted effort. For it is precisely their aim to forbid ac-
cess to critique.”27 With this caveat in mind, Reich should be viewed as no different
from many other artists, and yet the lack of an established critical discourse has
meant that Reich’s own words have effectively filled and continue to fill the gap.
As for the “work” involved in this book’s contributions, this, too, ranges
widely, encompassing sketch studies (including their digital variants), discourse
analysis and reception history, hermeneutic investigations, intertextual studies
(incorporating non-Western, popular, and Western art musics), the clarifying of
historical timelines and contexts, harmonic and formal analysis, philosophical
and religious ruminations, and deep archival digging. The last of these schol-
arly activities requires mention of the acquisition of the Steve Reich Collection
by the Paul Sacher Foundation (PSS), Basel (since 2008), which has greatly
facilitated and inspired new research on Reich. Most chapters in this volume
have benefited in some way from access to sketchbooks, letters, program notes,
article reviews, computer files, and other materials housed at the PSS. One ima-
gines that its contents would have been very different without this invaluable
resource, and we are grateful for its continued support of our efforts.
Rethinking Reich is divided into four parts, each containing three or four
chapters broadly relating to the area (or areas) in question. Part I  focuses on
political, aesthetic, and analytical concerns from a number of perspectives.
Sumanth Gopinath’s chapter takes as its starting point the infamous Carnegie
Hall performance of Reich’s Four Organs on January 18, 1973. Reading against
the backdrop of the late 1960s social, political, racial, and artistic climate,
Gopinath provides a range of hermeneutic readings of the work’s rhythmic, col-
oristic, and formal dimensions, including the notion that its augmentation pro-
cess functions as a trope for—among other things—space travel and exploration.
Ap Siôn’s chapter looks at a work written near the end of the 1970s, suggesting
that Octet (or Eight Lines, as it subsequently became known) represents a shift
in Reich’s aesthetic toward a more European way of thinking, which has been
partly obscured by the composer’s wish to foreground the importance of Jewish
influences and Hebrew chant. The other two chapters in this part offer different
perspectives on Reich’s more politically motivated works, with Maarten Beirens
drawing on sketch materials at PSS to try to make sense of the complex structure
of Different Trains and The Cave, while Ryan Ebright’s chapter contextualizes the
Introduction 9

latter work in terms of its attempts to produce an Americanized vision of Arab-

Israeli reconciliation.
Part II draws together three contrasting responses to issues of speech, repe-
tition, and identity in Reich’s music. Robert Fink’s chapter uses the composer’s
musical logocentrism in The Cave—or a compositional preoccupation with the
word as a kind of ideal—to tease out broader issues relating to religious iden-
tity and meaning, complexified by the composer’s word-saturated operatic lan-
guage. Speech of a different kind informs John Pymm’s survey of the prehistory
of Come Out, where he seeks to show how a more nuanced understanding of
this important early work can be aided by studying the composer’s sound col-
lage Harlem’s Six Condemned, which was also performed at the tape piece’s pre-
miere in 1966. More than forty years separate Come Out and WTC 9/11, which
forms the basis for Celia Casey’s investigation of Reich’s “docu-music” style, yet
both Pymm’s and Casey’s chapters draw on a range of recorded sound materials
housed at PSS in order to rethink the music’s original function and intention.
Part III consists of four chapters whose findings rely primarily on research
conducted at the archive. Matthias Kassel, director of the Steve Reich Collection,
outlines the diverse range of resources kept there, and the challenges facing
both scholar and archivist in dealing with “hybrid-analog” and “hybrid-digital”
materials, followed by three chapters that concentrate mainly on the composer’s
sketchbooks and e-sketches. Keith Potter reconsiders the harmonic content
of Reich’s breakthrough work, Music for 18 Musicians, in the light of various
sketches of its opening chord sequence. David Chapman traces the evolution
of Piano Phase from an essentially improvised piece to a fixed work through a
comparison of draft sketches, sound recordings, and other data relating to early
performances, while Twila Bakker reviews Reich’s work in the 1980s by focusing
on the composer’s set of Counterpoint pieces as seen through rhetorical shifts
and reception tropes, on the one hand, and computer files and e-sketches, on
the other.
Part IV moves away from matters of compositional strategy to questions
about the numerous non-Western influences on the composer’s music. Reich
has been quick to acknowledge his debt to African and Balinese music and cul-
tural practice, maintaining at the same time that his intention was never to imi-
tate them but to create a music with its own, unique sound that was nevertheless
“constructed in the light of one’s knowledge of non-Western structures.”28 Martin
Scherzinger’s chapter both maps out a detailed ethnographic context in which
to understand Reich’s extensive appropriation of African influences—including
the very notion of phasing itself—and examines how these elements are shaped
together in Electric Counterpoint. Michael Tenzer offers parallel reflections in
relation to Balinese music, with which the composer did not engage to the same
degree as music from the African continent. Kerry O’Brien’s concluding chapter
addresses the inherent paradox between freedom and control that lies at the
foundations of the composer’s musical language, revealing how yogic principles
10 Introduction

and practices during the early 1970s directed Reich toward a new compositional
aesthetic that was to manifest itself in Music for 18 Musicians.
Cutting across these divisions is a concern central to many, if not all, of the
chapters in Rethinking Reich: namely, the problem of musical meaning and her-
meneutics. The subject is a troublesome one for the composer, who, as both ap
Siôn and O’Brien remind us, received and responded to interpretive critiques
during the mid-1970s from German-language writers like Clytus Gottwald and
others who were influenced by the work of the philosopher and musicologist
Theodor Adorno. Well before that experience, Reich seems to have been al-
ready disinclined to cognize music through imagistic ideation and favored a
certain Wittgenstein- and process-art-influenced manner of straightforward,
unadorned description in lieu of the hermeneutics language game; as he put
it in one interview, music “doesn’t have a verbal translation.”29 But the German
experience left a bad taste in his mouth, which may resonate with his later
critique of Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music:  “One could say of Adorno, he
invents meaningless intellectual jargon to justify the simple fact that he likes
Schönberg and doesn’t like Stravinsky.”30 The hermeneutics on offer in this
volume, however, are largely not Adornian in tone or perspective (perhaps with
the exception of Tenzer’s Balinese expert listeners, who seem to disdain slow
repetition just as much as the philosopher did) but rather orient themselves to
particular musical geographies and creative practices (Africa for Scherzinger,
Bali for Tenzer, Europe for ap Siôn, experimental improvisation for Chapman,
documentary-cinematic auteurism for Casey), to specific historical contexts
(1960s space travel and political upheavals for Gopinath, 1980s US political
conservatism for Bakker, the Israel-Palestine conflict in the 1980s and early
1990s for Ebright), and to alternative philosophical perspectives (Hindu-yogic
for O’Brien, Derridean for Fink). In some cases, the same musical examples are
interpreted from strikingly different perspectives, offering a textbook demon-
stration of the Althusserian idea of “overdetermination,” or that there are mul-
tiple points of origin or causality for a given phenomenon.31 And even when the
word “hermeneutic” doesn’t really apply to particular chapters, as might be the
case for Potter’s and Beirens’s harmonic analyses and sketch studies, Kassel’s ar-
chival reflections, or Pymm’s historical contextualization, we still find moments
that surprise us: Reich’s conceptualization and working-out of the harmony for
Music for 18 Musicians from the top and middle downward, rather than up from
the bass, or his conscientious royalty payment arrangement with Daniel Hamm
for using his recorded voice in Come Out.
In the last instance, that should be the purpose of the necessarily specula-
tive art of musical hermeneutics: to surprise us, to help us reimagine what we
thought we knew well, to shake our foundations and leave us with new ideas and
ways of forming them—and, if we’re lucky, newly attained wisdom. Whether
or not we want to follow Lawrence Kramer and argue that hermeneutics is
foundational to the formation of the modern subject, a fundamental mode of
Introduction 11

post-Enlightenment knowing that provides an alternative to both dogmatism

and empiricism, we can agree with Reich that its purpose should not be to ra-
tionalize mere polemics of taste.32 Rather, the goal is to deepen one’s under-
standing of and engagement with music. Conducted with both critical integrity
and the spirit of generosity, the interpretation of musical meaning can provide
a powerful means of rethinking music, including Reich’s, without indiscrim-
inately wielding words as weapons or confusing personal tastes with politics.
* * *
An ancient luxury of replication. This phrase in Cunningham’s passage is poetic
but also puzzling. One the one hand, it refers explicitly to a seemingly long-ago
period of slowness in Bobby’s life in Cleveland, in contrast with the new speed
and intensity of his New York existence. As a description of Reich’s music, how-
ever, it is suggestive. “Replication” is a homological equivalent of musical repe-
tition, which maps onto Bobby’s earlier, repetitive work as a baker; “luxury” is
tied to beauty, comfort, and pleasure, applied here to the now-elusive slowness
of time in fast-paced New  York; “ancient” refers to the distant past, although
given Bobby’s recent relocation as narrated in this novel it might be read as
“(seemingly) ancient.” What is, then, seemingly ancient about Reich’s music?
Possibilities might include his abjuring of complex electronic technologies
during the 1970s in favor of familiar acoustic instruments, and, more broadly,
his reliance on older musical reference points, both Western and non-Western,
which weave their way into his music and rationalizations about it.33
An ideal of ancientness, of rooting one’s practice in something that is
very old and therefore arguably durable, is one dimension of what Reich
understands as his contribution to his generation’s musical counterrevolu-
tionary “restoration.”34 And a related component of that restoration is his com-
mitment to the aesthetic discourse of beauty and the apparent concomitant
belief that Western art music, historically, was once beautiful and then—due to
twelve-tone and serialist modernism—became ugly.35 Reich knows, of course,
that beautiful and ugly are “political words.”36 And one might argue that, with
the increasingly conservative critical impetus of some of his later music, Reich
has at times embraced a certain aesthetic ugliness for communicative effect.37
All of this notwithstanding, both the power and the attraction of Reich’s music
are indelibly bound up with its ability to afford listening pleasure—which, as
Fredric Jameson reminded us long ago, is a complex political issue.38 In light of
which, our ambition is for this book to stimulate both critical and hedonistic
impulses and, ideally, their dialectical intertwining. We encourage the reader
to luxuriate in listening to Reich’s music, returning to old favorites, exploring
less familiar works, and discovering relatively obscure compositions, many of
which deserve careful study but have not received it in this volume—such as
Reich’s Duet (1993), a beautiful, pastorally inflected piece dedicated to Yehudi
Menuhin and the composer’s take on the barococo string concerto that had a
hand in inspiring minimalist music in the first place.39 We are confident that
12 Introduction

reading, expounding upon, and arguing with the fourteen chapters of this book
will instigate new critical understandings of Reich’s music, perhaps including
insights into the very pleasure that it offers.
The recent wave of scholarship enabled by the Sacher archive demarcates
a turning point for those interested in examining and evaluating Steve Reich’s
music anew, but if there is truth in the claim that he is “America’s greatest
living composer,” then part of his music’s greatness must surely lie in its ability
to elicit a rich and diverse range of responses from critics, scholars, listeners,
and performers alike. We hope that the present volume will achieve its modest
aim of offering a thoughtful and provocative aid in rehearing, revisiting, and
rethinking a body of music that will continue to seize the imaginations of
listeners for years to come.

Notes

1. Cunningham 1998, 147–48.

2. Ibid., 126.
3. Michael Cunningham, liner notes to the film soundtrack to A Home at the
End of the World (2004).
4. A more explicit example of “serene stuttering” can be found in Alvin Lucier’s
I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), in which the composer famously uses a repetitive,
recursive process to “smooth out [the] irregularities” of his speech impediment.
Lucier’s work is likely influenced by Come Out, a work he heard and admired early
on. See Lucier 2012, 103–5. Also, see Robert Fink’s chapter in this volume for a dis-
cussion of the stuttering effect in Reich’s The Cave (1993). On the composer’s sam-
pling practice, see Reich 2002b, 201; Potter 2000, 169.
5. Reich generally is displeased by characterizations of his music as am-
bient; one of the editors recalls a testy answer by Reich to a question about the
relevance of ambient music to his own work at the 2005 Mannes Institute at the
Mannes School of Music, New York, on June 26. Many thanks to Wayne Alpern for
facilitating that editor’s attendance at the event. In relation to this, see the following
quote from an interview with Jonathan Cott: “You know, some critics of my earlier
pieces thought I was intending to create some kind of ‘hypnotic’ or ‘trance’ music.
And I always thought, ‘No, no, no, no, I want you to be wide awake and hear details
you’ve never heard before!’ People listen to things any way they wish, of course, and
I don’t have anything to say about it, even if I have written the pieces. But I actually
prefer the music to be heard by somebody who’s totally wide awake, hearing more
than he or she usually does, rather than by someone who’s just spaced-out and
receiving a lot of ephemeral impressions” (Reich 2002b, 129). In contrast, Reich
frequently invokes the discourse of and term “variation”; for example, in his dis-
cussion of Variations he notes that the piece is based “on an harmonic progression
somewhat in the manner of a chaconne” (2002b, 99). Also see Ivanovitch 2010 for
Introduction 13

a discussion of the notion of variation and a nonstatic reconceptualization of the

theme-and-variation form.
6. Schwarz 1996, 93. On Tehillim’s traditionalism, see Reich 2002b, 101.
7. See Reich 1987a, 67; Potter 2000, 152.
8. The first, by Kyle Gann, was first published in an article in the Village Voice in
1999. The second, by Guardian critic Andrew Clements, prefaced Reich’s appearance
as “Composer of the Week” on BBC Radio 3 in October 2010 (both quotes feature
prominently on the composer’s wiki page). Citations describing Reich as the United
States’ “greatest living composer” can also be found in the “Biography” section of his
website, at http://stevereich.com (accessed August 2, 2017).
9. Reich 2002b, 35. For a thought-provoking series of reflections on this
problem, see Quinn 2006.
10. Epstein 1986, 494–502.
11. Schwarz 1980–81, 373–92; 1981–82, 225–86.
12. Mertens 1983.
13. Warburton 1988.
14. Cowan 1986.
15. For an overview of the analysis of minimalist music, see T. Evans 2013, 241–58.
16. Potter 2000.
17. Cohn 1992.
18. Fink 1999, 126–27. Fink’s perspective here contrasts with previous analytical
attempts by Epstein (explicitly) and Cohn (implicitly) to find analytical “depth” in
minimalist music, as part of a broader attempt to “retire the surface–depth meta-
phor” (102). Our provisional and incomplete solution, discussed later in this in-
troduction and consonant with Fink’s other work on minimalism (especially Fink
2005), is to coax the debate away from analysis alone and towards hermeneutics
(with both being intimately related as “gnostic” undertakings, as argued in Abbate
2004). In his measured defense of gnostic inquiry vis-à-vis minimalist music, Quinn
(2006) notes, “if we are to get anywhere, we will need to fantasize” (293). We couldn’t
agree more; among other things, this volume is a collective effort of informed, stu-
dious fantasy in response to Reich’s music.
19. Hartenberger 2016; Reich 2002b.
20. Rebecca Eaton (2013) points out that the experimental films the composer
was involved in during the 1960s “effectively marked the end of Reich’s fledgling ca-
reer as a film composer” and that, given his lack of interest in scoring films, directors
have increasingly “embraced [the] option [of] licensing Reich’s music for film and
television shows” (183). In the latter capacity, she also mentions two films using
Reich’s music, A Home at the End of the World (2004) and The Dying Gaul (2005), as
well as the show So You Think You Can Dance (2009).
21. See the repeated i4/3–v7 Aeolian mode progression in mm. 396–97 (Reich
2000, 119). The piano chords enter just as the two walking men see each other, and
their turns and stares coincide with the chords’ crescendo—creating a striking de-
piction of sexual arousal and waxing desire, along with a tinge of foreboding.
14 Introduction

22. Cunningham 1998, 174. Two other films, The Dying Gaul (2005) and C.O.G.
(2013), also employ Reich’s music while directly exploring problems of gay male sex-
uality and identity. For more on Reich and film, see Gopinath and ap Siôn 2017.
23. For two very different reflections on time in minimalist music, see J. Kramer
1988, 375–97; Fink 2005b, 25–61.
24. See, for example, Dies 2013; Maimets-Volt 2013.
25. Cited in Strickland 1993, 221. The BSO’s second performance of Four
Organs, at Carnegie Hall in 1973, led to an infamous riot. For more information on
that event, see Gopinath’s chapter in this volume.
26. See Reich 1974 and Reich 2002b, respectively.
27. Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in Benjamin 1996, 313.
28. Reich 2002b, 71 (emphasis in original).
29. For the full context of this quote, see the following, from Kessler 1998: “When
I  was first giving concerts in Germany in the early to middle seventies, people
attacked [my] music as mechanical and said it didn’t have a language, in a sense of
a discursive language. I remember a letter I wrote to this guy in Stuttgart about it.
I said that I don’t think that (Beethoven’s 5th motive) ‘da da da daaa’ is fate knocking
at the door, I think that it’s an incredible four-note motive, that what’s remarkable
is that it continues through the scherzo and into the last movement. It’s the mo-
tive; it’s not really a melody, it’s a beginning of motivic organization, as opposed to
introducing an imaginary text into music, and saying ‘Well, what does it mean?’ The
opening motive in the Fifth Symphony is four notes followed by four more. That’s
what it means. It doesn’t have a verbal translation. Some people would say that it had
a philosophical idea which he then translated into music. I think that’s absurd.” In
other interviews, including Duffie 2010, Reich emphasizes his relative inability to
think imagistically, particularly in relation to music.
30. Reich 2002b, 185. Also see Adorno 2006.
31. See the essay “Overdetermination and Contradiction,” in Althusser 1969.
32. Kramer’s point here is nonetheless quite compelling. See L.  Kramer 2011,
2–3, 6, and passim. And, of course, for Adorno, the stakes were much higher than
taste polemics, which is why music scholars still care about what he had to say about
music, even when he was at his most tendentious. For a useful overview of these
matters, see Richard Leppert’s introduction to Adorno 2009. See also Paddison 1997.
33. See, for example, Reich 2002b, 107, in which he speaks of his “desire for an-
cient tradition and religious practice”—ancientness and spirituality also being pro-
foundly connected for Reich.
34. “I constantly say to people, ‘What we did was not a revolution—this was
a restoration.’ The music we were brought up in school to imitate—the music of
Boulez and Stockhausen—had become what we call mannerist. That doesn’t mean
the music was bad. It just means that it had gotten so recherche that it put itself off
in a corner. With just a tiny coterie listening to it” (Harris 2016).
35. For example, as he famously notes in a 1973 essay on his ensemble, “The
main issue is what’s happening musically; is this beautiful, is this sending chills up
and down my spine or isn’t it?” (Reich 2002b, 80).
Introduction 15

36. “One could also say, with some justification, that frequently ‘beautiful’ and
‘ugly’ are political words.” In Reich 2002b, 186.
37. One starting point for this trend might include the second movement of
Different Trains, and the sonic harshness of parts of City Life also comes to mind.
Both foreshadow comparably nonbeautiful passages in Three Tales and WTC 9/11.
38. See Jameson 1989, 61–74. Following Jameson, we might see Reich’s invoca-
tion of beauty as a form of aesthetic hedonism analogous to left hedonism during
the long 1960s (as per the New Left and poststructuralist theory, particularly after
Barthes); the aesthetic puritanism of musical high modernism would then correlate
to left puritanism (which is the dominant strain in the Marxist tradition).
39. See Fink 2005b, 169–207; Reich 2002b, 183, in which the composition seems
to be misdated to 1994. Numerous fine performances of Duet can be found on
YouTube as of this writing.
I
POLITICAL, AESTHETIC,
AND ANALYTICAL CONCERNS
1

“Departing to Other Spheres”

Psychedelic Science Fiction, Perspectival Embodiment, and
the Hermeneutics of Steve Reich’s Four Organs

Sumanth Gopinath

A quartet of four tiny electric organs, backed by the unvaried pulse

of four maracas players, is the scoring. Reich has, for this ensemble,
taken a chord, played by the four organs, and kept it going for some 20
minutes[.] Presumably the idea is for the listener to saturate himself in
the pure sound, concentrating, departing to other spheres on a cloud of
musical Zen.[ . . . ]
What Reich has done is confuse an acoustic phenomenon with music.
As such, “Four Organs” is non-music, just as so many minor baroque
compositions, written in tonic-dominant formulae without a trace of
personality, are non-music. Or as so much modern art is non-art—three
white triangles against a white background, or something like that. But it
fools a lot of people because all of this comes under the general heading
of “art.” Really it is “art” for people who are afraid of “art.” Or do not un-
derstand what art really is. Or who are too emotionally inhibited to want
to share the emotional and intellectual processes of a real creator’s mind.
“Four Organs” is baby stuff, written by an innocent for innocents.

So pronounced the eminent New  York Times music critic Harold Schonberg
only a couple of weeks after attending, and then reviewing, one of the most
infamous concerts in the history of musical minimalism.* Having received the

* Versions of this essay were given as talks. Thanks to faculty and graduate students
at the Ohio State University; scholars at a one-day Reich study session at Kings
Place, London; Ron Rodman and his students at Carleton College; faculty and
graduate students at Harvard University; Matthew McDonald and his students at
Northeastern University; Rob Haskins; and faculty, graduate students, and other
attendees at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Michigan, the University
of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the University of Minnesota, and
Yale University. Thanks to Bridget Carr at the Boston Symphony Orchestra archives
and Rob Hudson at the Carnegie Hall Archives. Thanks to Benjamin Givan for a

19
20 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

Pulitzer Prize in the previous year for his music criticism, Schonberg was surely
emboldened when writing snide dismissals of late modernist and experimen-
talist US-American composers like Elliott Carter, John Cage, and Steve Reich; in
the same article, he advocates for the future of art music as represented by British
composer Peter Maxwell Davies’s polystylistic and multimediatic work Vesalii
Icones (1969).1 The performance at which Schonberg had heard Four Organs
(1970) was part of a series of “Spectrum” concerts with a casually attired Boston
Symphony Orchestra (BSO). The music on the program spanned the centuries
and was conducted by rising star Michael Tilson Thomas. It was a milestone for
the series, which would make this concert its first in Carnegie Hall, in New York,
on Thursday, January 18, 1973. The theme was “a concert of musical multiples,”
and the program included Hexaméron (1837), a virtuoso collaborative work of
six variations on Bellini’s “March of the Puritans” from I puritani (1835) that
was composed by Liszt and by five of the other greatest pianists of the early
to mid-nineteenth century. Each composer-pianist contributed a variation (in-
cluding Thalberg, Czerny, and Chopin), and Liszt subsequently also wrote an
introduction and finale, as well as connecting interludes. Although the work
was originally written as a solo piano composition, on this occasion six pianists
performed Liszt’s arrangement for piano and orchestra—at times separately, at
others together, and all while accompanied by the BSO—and perhaps sought to
embody the meeting of piano heroes that never took place in the composition’s
contemporaneous moment.2
As Reich ruefully later noted, “[For] the kind of listener who’s going to get
off on that, and who’s coming to the BSO subscription series[,] the last thing in
the world that person is going to want to hear is my Four Organs . . . but there
it was.”3 Almost predictably, the audience—at least, its experienced rather than
“innocent” members4—began to sound their displeasure about five minutes
into the performance, and the noise grew over the remaining three quarters of
this slow rendition (the piece is usually about fifteen to sixteen minutes long),
with a variety of audience members’ responses entering unconfirmed into
the mythology surrounding the concert. Some audience members were seen
“brandishing” their “umbrellas,”5 and some yelled for the music to stop. Some
booed while others cheered. Infamously, an elderly woman supposedly banged

tip on searching the Boston Symphony Orchestra players, and to BSO percussionist
Frank Epstein for his generous responses to my inquiries. Many thanks to Russell
Hartenberger for his insights on and support for my work, and thanks to Will Robin,
Phil Kline, Arthur Press, Joan La Barbara, Greg Dubinsky, and Judy Sherman for
further help. Thanks to the Oral History of American Music at Yale University
for continuing to support my studies of Reich. Whenever possible, in this chapter
I’ve also included thanks to commentators on specific points; I  apologize for any
omissions, which are unintentional.
“Departing to Other Spheres” 21

her shoe on the stage in protest, and another person (possibly the same woman)
screamed, “All right—I’ll confess!”6 Tilson Thomas, who performed the work
along with Reich and other BSO members, had to wrest order from the growing
chaos; as he recently commented:  “I was playing away, and at the top of my
voice I was yelling ‘19, 20, 21, 22’. . . Seriously, that’s in no way an exaggeration.”7
Reich was crestfallen after the experience and wondered if the ensemble had
been able to stay together, but Tilson Thomas told him: “Forget about that. This
has been a historical event.”8 In his article, Schonberg was clearly on the side of
the detractors. Still, in his earlier concert review he admitted that Reich’s com-
position had touched a nerve, which led Schonberg to muse, “At least there was
some excitement in the hall, which is more than can be said when most avant-
garde music is being played.”9 The event has been likened to the riot in Paris at
the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring almost sixty years earlier (on May
29, 1913), with Nijinsky’s attempts to keep the dancers together in the face of
the noise by shouting out numbers being uncannily recalled by Tilson Thomas’s
efforts; one might also think of the protests at the Newport Folk Festival against
Bob Dylan’s electrified blues band on July 25, 1965, only seven and a half years
beforehand.10 Although no audio apparently exists of the Carnegie concert, the
combination of cheering and boos captured on the recording of the “trial run”
for it in Boston, on October 9, 1971, clearly demonstrates that, as the speaker
puts it, there was “a difference of opinion in the audience.”11
Schonberg and his audience have, in retrospect, been swept aside by the in-
exorable march of historical “progress” as musical minimalism, and particularly
Reich’s brand of it, have entered the increasingly capacious and seemingly ir-
relevant canon of Western musical history, especially that of an implicitly na-
tionalist history written with an American accent.12 Four Organs is pivotal in
this development. As Tilson Thomas predicted, the extremity of reaction to the
piece at the Carnegie concert led to it being far and away the most commented-
upon composition by the composer to that date, and the controversy thus vir-
tually guaranteed him a foothold in the art-musical canon, which would be
confirmed by a series of important compositions produced during the same
decade:  the lengthy and ambitious Drumming (1971); Clapping Music (1972)
for its eminently performable and anthologizable one-page simplicity; and his
most-praised composition, Music for 18 Musicians (1976). Reich subsequently
began composing for known soloists and ensembles besides his own, soon re-
ceived commissions, and by the late 1980s was an established and much-lauded
US art-music composer. Despite all of this, Four Organs has yet to receive an
extended scholarly interpretation. The work’s presumed radicalism appears to
have encouraged formalist descriptions and readings, and scholars have largely
followed Reich’s lead in discussing the work’s most obvious technical details: that
is, an extended dominant chord, rhythmically augmented and transformed into
a sequence of single notes. Indeed, as Virginia Anderson argues, the work was
taken up as an exemplar by British systems composers in the 1970s precisely
22 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

“because they understood it as a structural game.”13 And yet, taking a cue

from Robert Fink’s eliciting of interpretive meanings from hostile journalistic
reactions to minimalism,14 we might note that Schonberg’s criticism was not en-
tirely inapt. He emphasized that the ensemble was a self-described “rock organ
quartet” (a descriptor that has figured less prominently in recent discussions of
the work), he interpreted it as being detached from an individual creator’s mind,
and he characterized its effect in distinctly aerial terms.
In the remainder of this chapter, I will examine a series of signifiers in the
composition, including some specific, if hypothetical, intertextual linkages that
might help to generate a plausible, historically informed reading of the piece,
representing a line of inquiry that resonates with Schonberg’s observations. One
may attempt a speculative recovery in part by listening to the 1960s US/UK
pop/rock music indexed by the ensemble’s composition; to contemporaneous
post-bop jazz with which Reich was certainly familiar; and, in one case, to a tel-
evision soundtrack whose score would ultimately transform into a chestnut of
popular culture. In attending to the composition’s peculiar instrumentation, its
rhythmic-metrical patterns, and its overall trajectory, we might emerge from the
endeavor with a narrative of interest and, ideally, adequate to the strong reactions
the work evoked more than forty years ago. I will proceed by breaking the score
down into constituent moments, contextualizing and provisionally interpreting
them one at a time, before synthesizing these observations at the end.

Moment 1: Measure 0, 0:00–0:02

The piece begins with eleven eighth-note beats on the maracas (usually a
single player), at ♪ = 200.15 Russell Hartenberger and Jim Cotter both argue
that the constant maracas pulse may have been influenced by its presence in
the music of the blind experimental composer and musician Moondog (Louis
Hardin), who knew and made recordings with Reich and Philip Glass in the
late 1960s.16 But in the context of popular music, the maracas signify the sound
of much 1960s pop/rock, which had absorbed it from Latin musical influences
(often to imitate or reference them), particularly the Cuban and Puerto Rican
rumba, and from Mexican mariachi bands (the latter also a topos in country
music). Few top 20 hits of the 1950s included it, although Bo Diddley’s “Say
Man” was a notable exception.17 Intriguingly, the Rolling Stones picked up
on Diddley’s maraca use in their cover of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,”
which uses the Bo Diddley beat; from there on, a number of their 1960s hits,
including “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (1968) and “Sympathy for the Devil” (1968),
featured the maracas—perhaps leading other bands to get in on the act, like
The Who in “Magic Bus” (1968).18 Although Western art composers certainly
incorporated the maracas in the twentieth century, again often for exotic ef-
fect, classical percussionists typically hold the instrument horizontally, with
“Departing to Other Spheres” 23

their hands on top, maximizing control for differentiated attacks.19 In con-

trast, both in Four Organs and in rock, the maracas are held vertically, with
relatively quickly repeated eighth notes that are articulated consistently, so
that the quieter half-divisions of these beats are heard as well. (By way of con-
trast, it’s worth attending to the way that the BSO percussionists played Four
Organs in 1971, at a slower ♪ = 193 and the resulting mushiness in articula-
tion, caused by tempo, part doubling, and technique.)20 With this use of ma-
racas being most characteristic of auxiliary percussion in rock, the music that
opens Four Organs seems to be a synecdoche of rock, a part standing for the
whole, and the maracas function mainly as a signifier of rock, much more
than as an ethnic or exotic signifier within rock. But even though the rock ref-
erence seems to be the primary one, when we keep in mind the prevalence of
constantly pulsing shaker parts in many sub-Saharan African musics, distinct
points of reference for this kind of maracas playing may be subsumed into
a broadly African/African-diasporic rhythmic practice that has had a wide-
ranging impact on music across the globe.21 That said, Michael Veal has also
argued that the maracas pulses may be interpreted as reminiscent of Native
American rattles in initiation rites like vision quests—suggesting a different
ethno-racial lineage for this musical element.22

Moment 2: Measure 1, 0:02–0:05

The four organs enter in the first proper measure of the composition. Three
dimensions of this measure stand out in some respect. The first, and following
Schonberg’s emphasis on sound, is the organ timbre—a loud (forte) and espe-
cially reedy, trebly sound emanating from four amplified Farfisa Mini Compact
combo organs that Reich had bought used in New  York.23 Farfisa, an Italian
company, produced its electronic organs initially as electronic accordions, be-
fore changing their housing in 1964 to compete with other electronic combo
organ manufacturers (including Vox organs). The Vox Continental was a
better-known organ used by most of the major rock bands at the time, but the
Farfisa models were cheaper and therefore favored by garage bands.24 In its tran-
sistor accordion version it was used as early as Del Shannon’s “Ginny in the
Mirror” (1962), and in this case as well as later songs that use the instrument,
we hear it primarily in an upper line embellishing or doubling the melody, al-
though chordal passages are present as well.25 (For example, “Mirage” [1967]
by Tommy James and the Shondells presents only such an upper line, whereas
Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs’ “Wooly Bully” [1965] includes only chords.)
The low quality of the keyboards Reich initially used in performance is evident
in the 1970 Shandar recording of Four Organs, in which one can hear tuning
inconsistencies and extraneous keyboard sounds (such as volume swells after
the first few attacks, as at 0:05 and 0:08).26
24 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

The second aspect of the music is the pitch material that the organs col-
lectively play, which can be labeled as an E dominant-eleventh chord, since it
includes the pitch classes of all A  major diatonic thirds above the bass E up
to the tonic (E–G♯–B–D–F♯–A), with every pitch except B3 doubled once or
twice; this is Reich’s preferred labeling (which I  generally use later). Because
that labeling implies a voicing featuring stacked thirds and the actual chord is
voiced as a cluster chord, it may perhaps be better described as an E9sus4 with
an added third (see Ex. 1.1a–c).27 The voicing highlights the clash between G♯4
and A4, with the notes sometimes sounding simultaneously and at other times
oscillating, the A4 resolving down to G♯4 and then returning to the A4 disso-
nance. One could also simply describe it as a diatonic cluster chord—say, as
[24689E], hexachordal set-class 6-33 (023579), or even a three-sharp diatonic
(or Mixolydian) cluster—with an E or [4] in the bass (Ex. 1.1d). As the pro-
gression expands in duration, the music takes on the character of an extended
cadential resolution, making the piece amount to what Reich jokingly has called
“the longest V–I cadence in the history of Western music.”28 A variant of this
chord was found in the middle section of Reich’s now suppressed film sound-
track to Robert Nelson’s film Oh Dem Watermelons (1965), in which appears
a dominant-seventh chord (this one in D major) that includes the third and
fourth above the bass, closely spaced so as to produce a harsh minor-second
dissonance (see Ex. 1.1e, transposed to A major for comparison). Reich claims
that this chord was used frequently by Thelonious Monk and interprets it as
based on a conflict between tonic and dominant harmonies of a key (the elev-
enth or suspended fourth being the tonic of the key), and in this capacity, the
third, as a leading tone, adds a certain amount of dominant-ness.29 Indeed, as
Ian Quinn notes, Reich used the word “watermelon” to refer to exactly this type
of harmony in his sketchbooks prior to the composition of Four Organs.30 One
canonical example of such a chord in post-bop jazz can be found in the opening
of Wynton Kelly’s piano accompaniment in Miles Davis’s recording of “Someday

Example 1.1 Four Organs (1970), m. 1 chord comparisons: (a) as written, B3 the only
undoubled pitch; (b)  as E dom11; (c)  as E dom9-sus4-add3; (d)  as [24689E] with [4]
in bass, set-class 6-33 (023579), or 3♯-diatonic/E without C♯; (e) Oh Dem Watermelons
(1965), watermelon-canon chord, transposed to A  major; (f)  Wynton Kelly’s chordal
opening in “Someday My Prince Will Come” (1961), transposed to start on E3; (g)  E
dom9-sus4, “Maiden Voyage” chord, transposed from D.

(a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g)

“Departing to Other Spheres” 25

My Prince Will Come” (1961), in Example 1.1f, although here the tonic scale
degree is not on the top, and the voicing avoids the minor second clash between
the leading tone and tonic degrees.31 A related type of harmony, a minor ninth
or dominant-ninth chord with a suspended fourth, has a similar effect and is
also common in post-bop jazz of the 1960s; one influential example is Herbie
Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage” (1965), which is made up almost entirely of these
chords (see Ex. 1.1g, transposed to an E bass, for comparison).32 Although such
chords appear on occasion in 1960s rock and popular music, for the most part
they are foreign to that music’s chordal vocabulary, and so we might think of this
harmony as essentially ensconced in postwar jazz.33
The third, and perhaps most important, aspect of this moment is the duration
of the measure, which is an unusual eleven beats—in contrast to the predomi-
nance of twelve-beat and eight-beat measures in Reich’s pieces during the 1960s
and 1970s. Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music, which devotes
a lot of space to Reich’s music, claims, “For minimalist purposes [eleven] is a
magic number, because it is a prime number. Divisible neither by two nor by
three, it remains always subtactile; it cannot be grouped mentally into a regular
tactus or felt beat.”34 Taruskin’s emphasis on subtactile pulses, or steady, foun-
dational rhythmic units shorter than the perceived beat, is not unreasonable in
this piece: the music clearly has a kind of hiccup and feels unsteady due to the
11/8 (3/8 + 8/8) meter heard in the first fifteen measures (which are repeated a
relatively free number of times as determined in an individual performance),
and the maracas do indeed present a rock-solid stability at a lower level within
that broader metrical instability (see Ex. 1.2a). Nevertheless, one does settle into
a kind of additive-metrical groove (an experience not unfamiliar to musicians
within traditions that regularly use such meters), and the music stays mostly
consistent for about two minutes of the original recording, allowing one to

Example 1.2 Rhythmic groupings in Four Organs, m. 1: (a) as written; (b) recalls simpler

3 + 5 groove in 4/4; (c) rewritten m. 1 as 3 + 5 + three-beat pickup (or 8 + 3).

(a)

(b)

(c)
26 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

acclimate to the odd meter. More importantly, however, Reich has constructed
this music cleverly, so as to evoke the feeling of a simpler groove, namely, a 3 +
5 division of a 4/4 meter—and one could imagine a simpler version of the music
that feels more “natural” and certainly more like rock music, if less interesting
(Ex. 1.2b).35 Reich’s composition, then, might be heard as appending a three-
beat pickup to a 4/4 measure. This makes for a 3 + 5 + 3 division of 11/8 or, more
simply, an 8 + 3 division of 11—that is, the opposite of the way in which Reich
notated it (Ex. 1.2c).36
As will be shown shortly, the extra three beats pose a metrical “problem”
that Reich then “solves” over the course of the composition. But they also allow
him to obscure the music’s apparent origins in an unevenly divided 4/4 groove
that was common in rock music of the 1960s (and beyond) and which found
its origins in African-diasporic clave patterns in Cuba and elsewhere. The first
half of the “3-2” clave (Ex. 1.3a), found in Cuban son, mambo, salsa, and many
other musics, originally made its way in various shapes to North America in the
form of the tresillo rhythmic figure or 3 + 3 + 2 pattern (Ex. 1.3b); it could also
be found in specific derivations from the habanera and danzón dance forms.37
Richard Cohn notes that the tresillo was “self-consciously imported into notated
American music by the middle of the nineteenth century, where it serves as
an ostinato in Caribbean-themed compositions of Louis Moreau Gottschalk.”38
Postwar R&B in New Orleans made extensive use of this pattern, especially in
the music of Professor Longhair, who was influenced by Pérez Prado’s mambo
records, and others who produced songs featuring “mambo” in the lyrics (as
in the Hawketts’ “Mardi Gras Mambo” [1955]),39 as well as songs like the Dixie
Cups’ “Iko Iko” (1965), a popular version of James “Sugar Boy” Crawford’s song
“Jock-A-Mo” (1953).40 Through the influence of New Orleans R&B on early rock
music, soul, and funk, as well as the alternate route of the 3-2 clave rhythm via
Bo Diddley’s own appropriation or coincidental recreation of Cuban musical
rhythms (via black diasporic rhythmic continuities), this rhythmic pattern be-
came a foundational structure in much 1960s rock.41

Example 1.3 3-2 clave and tresillo patterns in Four Organs: (a) 3-2 clave; (b) tresillo, same
as “3” in 3-2 clave; (c) 3 + 5, simplified tresillo, common in rock.

(a)

(b)

(c)
“Departing to Other Spheres” 27

A clear example of a simplified 3 + 5 rock tresillo (Ex. 1.3c) is the guitar

solo section (starting at 3:00 in) of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” (1969),
which features the lead guitar responding to the calls of the 3 + 5 groove, with
punched-out chords recalling Reich’s, and the hi-hat, which serves a similar
subtactile function as Reich’s maracas.42 This song, of course, is much faster than
Reich’s composition, and the main pulses of drummer John Bonham’s hi-hat
are quarter notes (although one can hear the offbeat eighths as well—in a way
similar to the maracas’ offbeat sixteenths in Reich’s work). Songs featuring a
slower 3 + 5 figure might include the horn hits at the opening of James Brown’s
“Super Bad” (1970),43 or the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (1968), the
middle, instrumental section (at about 1:30) of which features eighth-note ma-
racas and the 3 + 5 and tresillo rhythm prominently in the bass (played here
by guitarist Keith Richards).44 A final example is suggested by a lightly drawn
melodic figure written by Reich in his sketchbooks during the gestation of Four
Organs; it recalls the main riff from The Kinks’ highly influential “You Really
Got Me” (1964).45

Moment 3: Measure 11, 1:34

At this point in the piece, the two chords have begun their process of grad-
ually merging into a single chord, while a pickup figure has grown from a
single eighth note in measure 4 into a three eighth-note figure by measure
11 built on the root and fifth of the E extended dominant chord (specifically,
E4 and B4; see Ex. 1.4). The figure has now filled in the three-beat pickup, as
if to confirm our suspicions that the meter was in fact to be subdivided into
8 + 3. The three-note figure, however, also recalls a kind of three-note post-
bop jazz pickup figure in famous compositions like “Maiden Voyage,” which
also uses the root and fifth in the piano and bass parts (see Ex. 1.5), or sax-
ophonist/composer Wayne Shorter’s “Speak No Evil” (1966), which puts the
pickup in the melody line played by the horns. The three-note pickup persists

Example 1.4 Reduction of Four Organs, m. 11, with three-note pickup identified.

28 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

Example 1.5 Opening riff of Herbie Hancock, “Maiden Voyage” (1965).

for several measures: in fact, it does so as the chord elongates toward measure
18, where it now is a single chord occupying four whole beats, followed by a
four-beat rest and the three-beat pickup figure. This bar, which Reich notates
as being 4 + 4 + 3, is the endpoint of a process to eliminate the 3 + 5 tresillo
figure into a squarer, simpler unit, which then kicks off a further process of
expanding the pickup into four-beat pickup (at m. 22, 3:24), rearranging the
eleven-beat measure into a 4 + 3 + 4 grouping (explicitly notated by Reich)
and anticipating the bass note’s arrival one eighth note beforehand (starting in
m. 19) so as to blur the downbeat attack. The solidity of the groove gradually
melts into air.

Moment 4: (a) Measure 23, 3:38 and (b) Measure 26, 4:11

Now the work undergoes its most significant transformation. From this measure
on, Reich incrementally lengthens the duration of each measure, adding a few
beats here and there until, by the end of the piece, the last full measure includes
265 beats in total. The composer treats this augmentation process first by adding
time to the sustained E dom11 chord—two beats in measure 23, two more in
measure 24, three more in measure 25, and so on. Beginning in measure 24,
while adding these beats, he also notates the selective release of individual keys
in the sustained chord, so that it gradually reduces to a few notes. By measure
26, the effect is quite noticeable, and this remains the case for the remainder of
the work. Four Organs’ method of transforming a chord into individual attacks
via recomposition and augmentation is the most frequently treated aspect of the
piece in scholarly and journalistic literature and is usually linked to a number of
influences, including (1) the composer’s failed technological experiments with
what he called the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate, a device that would precisely con-
trol the timings of pitched pulses and thus allow for the gradual transformation
between a chord and melody (as in his now withdrawn work Pulse Music);46
(2) a concept piece called Slow Motion Sound (1967), in which a sound would
maintain its pitch while slowing down (using computational methods that are
nowadays commonplace);47 and (3) Reich’s frequently expressed interest in the
“Departing to Other Spheres” 29

medieval organum composers of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Léonin

and Pérotin.48
While all these reference points for Reichian augmentation are surely rel-
evant, an obvious one linked especially with the second was the rise of tape
manipulation in both experimental and popular musics; the former was part of
Reich’s training, his having studied at Mills College under Luciano Berio—who
had composed some highly regarded tape works—and in his compositional
practice, after having gained access to inexpensive tape recorders and then be-
ginning the process of composing for tape between 1963 and 1966 (including
The Plastic Haircut, Livelihood, It’s Gonna Rain, Come Out, and Melodica), in-
itially under the auspices of the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Tape slow-
down effects are perhaps more common in experimental and avant-garde tape
music than in popular songs, although the latter famously benefited from the
influence of the former thanks to the Beatles, their producer George Martin and
engineer Geoff Emerick, and many other groups, producers, and engineers, and
helped to inaugurate various forms of art and psychedelic rock.49 But the aug-
mentation and reduction of the E dom11 chord produce another strange effect
accentuated by the Farfisa organ key releases, one that sounds somewhat remi-
niscent of the rapid cutoffs of tape-reversed recordings, especially around 4:11,
corresponding to measure 26.50 Used extensively by the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix,
and numerous other artists, tape reversal was perhaps the single most charac-
teristically psychedelic studio effect used during the decade, so much so that its
popularity quickly waned in the 1970s.51 Signifying an otherworldly sound or an
altered and/or drug-induced state of mind—such as the semiconscious state of
mind in the Beatles’ “I’m Only Sleeping” (about 1:30 in)—tape-reversal effects
in Reich’s recording lead Four Organs to accrue such associations at this point,
with the releases often occurring with doubled pitches and at irregular timings
so as to perhaps evoke the sometimes unusual rhythms caused by the technique.
One more aspect of the composition merits mention. As the E chord is elon-
gated over the remainder of the composition, Reich includes numerical counts
within each measure showing explicitly how and where the elongations take
place, presumably with the goal of facilitating synchronization between the
performers. At first, as mentioned previously, beats are added to the end of the
chord, until it achieves a point of seven distinct subsections, each marked by
one or more key releases (so, in m. 28 we have 4 + 3 + 2 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 3). But by
measure 29, the durations of the subdivisions have begun to grow (thus, m. 29
begins 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 3), and both processes continue irregularly while
revealing the same pattern: a gradual numerical countdown, then a less regular
oscillation in the range of the lower numbers of that countdown. (By the penul-
timate and longest measure [m. 42], the chord countdown reaches 24 + 20 + 16
+ 14 + 12 + 10 + 9 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 7 + 8 + 9, reflecting roughly the same contours
on a longer and more varied scale.)52
30 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

Moment 5: Measure 37, 7:37

Toward the midpoint of the piece, another process that had begun in measure
29 becomes increasingly apparent: not only has the initial chord been elon-
gated, but the four-note pickup (or three-note pickup + anticipation of the
downbeat’s full chord) undergoes a similar augmentation process. It is the
exact opposite of the chordal augmentation in that it begins with a single held
note and gradually accumulates pitches until it reaches an also-augmented
downbeat-chord anticipation; as early as measure 19, that anticipation has
been channeled to the right half of the stage, while the left half gets the re-
maining attacks for the downbeat, and with the slowdowns the spatialization
effect becomes more evident. As the attacks slow down in frequency with the
increasing durations of individual measures, a slow, spacious melodic motive
emerges, beginning on E4—as the only key in the texture—and continuing to
B4 and then D4. This figure grows more adorned as the piece continues. At
measure 39 (8:38), an almost epiphanic arrival occurs: the opening E dom11
chord, which had been reducing down to two pitch classes (E and A, as E4, A4,
and A5) before cutting out, now sustains that last remaining set of notes, which
it will do all the way until the anticipatory pickup attack of the full chord at
the end of the measure (see Ex. 1.6). The composite effect is that the sound of
A (A4, mainly) emerges from a fuller texture and then serves at the beginning
of the expanded pickup’s melodic fragment to yield A(4)–E4–B4–D4 (with
repeated attacks on the E and B), with other notes, A4 and F♯4, now being
appended to these four. The slowness and spatial quality of the passage are
highly reminiscent of another slow, quasi-Mahlerian four-note motive begin-
ning with a descending A-E and built on accumulating sustained pitches that
was part of an important cultural phenomenon during the 1960s: Alexander
Courage’s title cue music to the television show Star Trek (1966–69), which
coincided with and both critically and uncritically commented upon the Cold
War and the space program, the black liberation struggle, the Vietnam War,
and other political themes of the period (see Ex. 1.7a–c). As Jessica Getman
argues, the title cue’s internal stylistic shifts reflect the social tensions found
in the series;53 crucially, it is only the first section of Courage’s theme that is

Example 1.6 Four Organs, m. 39 (93 beats in), melodic theme, now tied to sustained A.
“Departing to Other Spheres” 31

Example 1.7 Comparison of pitches in Four Organs; in (a) Four Organs melody; (b) Star

Trek title cue music (1966), opening; and (c) Mahler, Symphony no. 1, mvt. 1 (1887–88),
opening melodic figure, complete statement (mm. 18–21).
All notes are sustained in the Reich, only the first four are sustained in Star Trek, and a sus-
tained A (in multiple registers) precedes the melody in Mahler. Bar lines do not correspond
to original scores, and rhythmic distributions are approximate.

(a)

(b)

(c)

evoked, which in the television theme figures “space,” in contrast to the explo-
ration of a final frontier by the heroic captain and crew of the Enterprise (as
figured by the theme’s trumpet fanfare, corresponding to the last eight notes of
Ex. 1.7b). As Four Organs progresses further, the melody adds two more notes
within the A major diatonic scale, B3 and G♯4, all the while maintaining its
celestial quality, which is itself intensified as the increasingly sustained chords
produce slow, throbbing beating effects.54

Interpretation

Of all the signifiers just discussed, the gradually emerging melody in Four
Organs may prove to be the decisive “hermeneutic window”55 in any reading
of the piece, but before jumping to conclusions we should list the different
signifiers found thus far. They include the following:
• rock-music maracas playing even eighth notes, recalling African/
African-diasporic maracas and shakers or Native American rattles;
• cheap, garage band Farfisa Mini Compact combo organs;56
• jazzy E dominant-eleventh chord or sus4 with added third (including
alternations between apparent dissonances and resolutions);
• 3 + 5 rock tresillo pattern, with an extra three-beat pickup;
• filled-in pickup, possibly evocative of a post-bop jazz pickup trope;
• loud volume and spatial treatment of the organs via left/right channels
(bass surrounding listener, chord oscillations after m. 19);
• metrical shifts smoothing out the tresillo allusion in favor of a 4 + 4 + 3
or 4 + 3 + 4 pattern;
• augmentation technique (expanding from 11 beats to 265 in a single
measure—an order-of-magnitude shift), inspired by electronic
technologies and medieval organum;
32 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

• key releases, somewhat reminiscent of tape reversal (when combined

with beating-induced swells);
• nested countdown built into the E dom11 chord;
• the pickup’s transformation into a melody, one that increasingly sounds
akin to the space evocation portion of the Star Trek theme;
• throbbing beating effects of sustained chords, in part due to the Farfisas’
tuning inconsistencies.
A series of potential readings might follow from this trajectory, the most self-
evident of which arises from the penultimate point, as well as the prominent nu-
merical countdowns,57 the slowing-down effect of the augmentation, and our tip
from Schonberg that the piece’s sympathetic listeners depart “to other spheres.”
At the manifest level, the piece suggests a homology to space travel or at least a
perspectival shift from one on the Earth to one viewing it from afar or viewing
other worlds altogether.58 In this sense, Four Organs might work in a similar way
to the Charles and Ray Eames’s documentary film Powers of Ten (1977; proto-
type versions were made in 1963 and 1968), and it is curious to consider that
Reich’s augmentation process does literally expand by more than an order of
magnitude (or power of ten) during its course.59 A perspectival shift caused by
imaginary space travel resonates with the Apollo space program of the 1960s,
the big successes of which included the Apollo 8 lunar orbit mission in 1968,
which allowed humans to see the Earth from much greater distances than had
hitherto been possible, and of course the famous Apollo 11 lunar landing mis-
sion of 1969, humanity’s maiden voyage to the moon occurring in mid-July of
the summer during which Reich first conceptualized Four Organs (in August).
Indeed, with this in mind, we might consider a strange, surrealistic doodle
that Reich drew in his sketchbooks around the time that the work began
gestating in his mind (see Fig. 1.1).60 It is difficult to interpret, but it appears
to be some kind of uniformed or robed figure (or perhaps an animal or a face)
departing into space and releasing polygons underneath it, in a way reminiscent
of the Apollo rocket and spacecraft’s detaching modules.
Perhaps this figure is a kind of monk, ghost, or spacesuited individual
escaping into orbit, and thus arguably a self-representation by Reich at this
time in his career. One might add to this interpretation by reading the arrange-
ment of Four Organs’ performers, which has an almost cockpit-like appearance,
with keyboards taking on the semblance of flight consoles;61 the trope of the
recording studio as flight system and/or spaceship resonates both with popular
culture imagery and with discourse about it of the time—consider the work
of George Clinton, Silver Apples, and King Tubby, among others—as well as
Reich’s participation in quasi-scientific artistic endeavors like his work in Bell
Labs or with Yale’s Pulsa group.62
Much more, of course, could be said about the imaginaries and imagery of
space exploration and their attendant ideologies during the late 1960s, but one
“Departing to Other Spheres” 33

Figure 1.1 An approximate transcription of Reich’s sketchbook doodle, August 14, 1969.

Reich’s doodle is more perfectly vertical, with the figure at the top bending slightly to
the left.

additional point helps to enrich our reading: specifically, the way in which the
bumpy rock-based music is smoothed out during the first part of the piece,
suggesting a process in which entrainment is gradually undone over the course
of the work.63 It is as if one were literally, if not entirely comfortably, “grounded”
34 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

by the work at first, only to become increasingly ungrounded as it unfolds.64 One

might think, then, not only of the physical dimensions of flight but also of an
experience of floating—in zero gravity, or even in the sensory deprivation float-
ation tanks used to test training astronauts at the time.
Sensory deprivation tanks have also been known to generate hallucinations,
including out-of-body experiences—as in the way that Richard Feynman
described in his famous memoir, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”
(1985).65 As have, of course, psychedelic substances, which were bound up
with the history of 1960s rock (even if many investigations of that relation-
ship have been overly preoccupied with simple mappings between somatic
experience and musical effects).66 Nonetheless, the subtle suggestions of tape
reversal in the piece point not only to other forms of imagined bodily pro-
jection but also to the generational animus with which Schonberg lambastes
Reich’s listeners, who float “on a cloud of musical Zen.” The critic’s comment,
explicitly directed at the followers of John Cage, remains one step shy of
explicitly criticizing the counterculture and younger artists like Reich who
were involved in it; for skeptics, this was a social world involving a narcis-
sistic conjunction of meditation and Eastern spiritual practices (one must
not forget that Reich was a serious practitioner of hatha yoga and prana-
yama at the time), psychedelic drugs and their hallucinations, and an escape
from the emotional and communicative realities of the present world and its
human inhabitants (as well as its wearying world of labor and employment).67
Schonberg, however, is not wrong to allude to the antihumanist aspects of
this work—it does not seem to represent a subjectivity except in the barest
sense, the subject as observer of a process, albeit one that appears to have an
ecstatic or epiphanic endpoint. The experience of escape by floating out of
one’s body and above the Earth might well be figured as a psychedelic one,
but in Four Organs it gives the listener a sense of omniscience, of being—
rather than ear-witnessing—the sublime.
What, then, is the omnisciently observing narrative subject escaping while
experiencing Four Organs? In part, we might propose, it is the signifiers of
blackness, of African America coalesced into a snapshot groove encompassing
a panorama of black and black-derived cultural practices—Latin dances, New
Orleans grooves, jazz chords, rock music—and sublimates them into an expe-
rience intended to be “beautiful,” to send “chills up and down [one’s] spine,”68
to paraphrase Reich’s famous critique of improvisation (a critique implicitly
laden with essentialized racial affiliations and positionings).69 Reich, as com-
positional antisubject, achieves liftoff in Four Organs, escaping the political and
racial tensions and traumas of the 1960s by hearing them at a distance, an order
of magnitude away from their source—and thus perhaps the work should be
heard in counterpoint to Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” (1970), which
offered a pointed critique of the racial dynamics and imaginaries of the space
program.70 Such, however, was not the case for the 1973 Carnegie Hall audience
“Departing to Other Spheres” 35

members who took umbrage at the idea of a composer subjecting them to an

unending chord and relatively loud volume coming from a pseudo–rock band
onstage. They comprised a constituency that was, in all likelihood, not clued
in to the technologies of the self peddled and consumed by Reich and other
artists of his moment, and the composing subject’s omniscience—in contrast
to the performing composer’s sheer terror—was surely an affront to the por-
tion of the audience that was looking for relatively elite, humanist entertain-
ment and not, as Tilson Thomas put it at the previous iteration of the program
in Boston, “a piece . . . for virtuoso listeners.”71 Their moment, after all, was one
of escape, too—in this case, from the calamities of American society that came
knocking in January 1973, including the resignation of President Nixon and a
stock market crash that presaged an OPEC oil embargo that would cripple the
world economy, setting it on its decades-long downturn from which it has yet to
recover.72 Given that Reich ultimately benefited greatly from this audience’s dis-
pleasure on that one occasion, perhaps it is worth attempting to ponder exactly
what they lost in the transaction.
And yet, one may also argue that the logics of racial-political escape do not
fully capture Four Organs’ modes of making meaning, even while accepting
the basic premises of this science-fictional interpretation. Two reasons come
to mind. First, despite the considerable distance from the initial moments
of the work that the auditor perceives by its end, there is an element from
the outset that remains:  the maracas. Continuing steadfastly until the very
end, the persistence of a percussion stream indelibly tied to the logics of an
African/African-diasporic or Native American musical practice might make
us appreciate a certain resistance within the work itself to a depoliticizing nar-
rative of transcending the social. Second, due to the increasing saturation of
the sonic space with sustained organ tones, as well as the enlarging metrical
contexts in which one hears the maracas, the aural experience of that per-
cussive layer changes over the course of the piece, transforming from a crisp,
rhythmic groove element (clearly perceptible due to the presence of consider-
able textural gaps) into what sounds much more like a machinic set of white-
noise pulses, reminiscent of the end of Reich’s dystopian tape piece, Come Out
(1966).73 In Four Organs, however, these pulses’ affective resonance is more
ambivalent, retaining something of their uncanny edge in the earlier tape
piece and yet at the same time oddly contributing to the major-mode diatonic,
quasi-cadential radiance of the later composition.74 To propose one possible
affirmative reading, are they hopeful (if unrealistically sonified) machinic,
mechanical-engine-like chugs that transport us as listening subjects into the
beyond?75 The ambiguous meanings and valences of those maraca pulses offer
us an object lesson in the dialectical transformation of quantity into quality
discussed by Friedrich Engels and so often treated by Fredric Jameson: heard
enough times and in a slightly different context, these pulses become some-
thing else entirely.76 As elements subjected to a scalable process of expansion,
36 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

the pulses demonstrate the fundamental nonscalability of rhythm, transmuting

a thing, through repetition, into something else.77 Instead of being infinitely
addable ticks in a digital counter, maraca pulses—like everything else in Four
Organs—tell a story.78

Epilogue

Hermeneutic readings of musical compositions/performances are personal

undertakings that, in the last instance, have relatively little to do with the re-
covery of intention—a notion that has been frequently critiqued, reaffirmed,
and problematized within English-language musicology, especially since the
1980s.79 Given my own preoccupations with racial politics in the United States
during the long 1960s and its relevance to Reich’s music, the interpretive turns
outlined in this chapter should not be terribly surprising.80 And while my
approach maintains the goal of pursuing interpretive plausibility,81 seeking,
at some level, to engage in an imaginary interpretive conversation with the
textual horizon of Four Organs, as defined within Gadamerian hermeneu-
tics,82 I remain sympathetic to the critique of the hermeneutic circle and the
persistent advocacy of interpretive freedom by Lawrence Kramer.83 (Indeed,
such interpretive lines of flight could well be justified by Schonberg’s aerial
metaphor.)
But written interpretations can unintentionally congeal into quasi-truths;
so, with this in mind, it might be worthwhile to propose an alternate reading of
the piece that aligns more closely with the composer’s priorities and published
statements. That reading would begin by foregrounding the maracas con-
nection to Moondog—one of Reich’s musical associates and contemporaries
during the time of the work’s composition, his lunar moniker notwithstanding.
It would then acknowledge the African American and African American–
derived vernacular musical sources that Reich himself identifies (Monk, rock)
while also noting that the opening harmony and rhythmic gesture is strik-
ingly Stravinskian (see, for example, the punctuated G dom11 chords in the
“Russian Dance,” measure 47 and after, from Petrushka).84 This reading could
then interpret the work’s ending melodic line as inspired neither by Star Trek
(by interpreting its similarity to the television show’s title cue music as an aural
pseudomorphism) nor by the Apollo program (by appreciating the rift between
the counterculture’s and the establishment’s understanding of the space pro-
gram85) but rather by medieval chant and organum, in accordance with the
composer’s own description of his inspiration for the augmentation process.86
Even the psychedelic effects of the Farfisa key cutoffs may evoke comparable
key cutoffs in Baroque organs rather than tape reversals, or they may even re-
call a similar key-release technique in measure 74 of the finale of Schumann’s
“Abegg” Variations, op. 1.87 In light of which, one could interpret the departure
“Departing to Other Spheres” 37

not as one into space but as one back in time, in which the modernist and
vernacular twentieth century gives way to the premodern (or early modern),
largely leapfrogging the era of “middle-class favorites” of Reich’s childhood that
he subsequently abjured.88 Four Organs, in this reading, narrates the develop-
ment of Reich’s own aesthetic preferences, as a strange kind of Bildungsroman.
These two distinct readings can, however, be synthesized. One could consider,
for example, the peculiar racial politics of Petrushka;89 the fad for Baroque key-
board styles in 1960s rock organ playing (as in Matthew Fisher’s organ part
in Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” or Ray Manzarek’s organ part in
“Light My Fire” by the Doors);90 and, more generally, the blending of the fu-
turistic (modern drug technologies, tech-utopianism) and distantly past (such
as medieval and early modern aesthetics, the study of ancient civilizations and
religions, etc.) in the aesthetic tastes and intellectual lives of the counterculture,
not to mention familiar artistic precedents for such admixture—as in the long-
standing, overlapping literary and cinematic genres of space opera, planetary
romance, and sword-and-planet.91
But a more pointed sublation of these readings can be characterized simply
in terms of flight-as-escape: flight from a troubled present and toward a future
anchored by durable traditions. A restless search for origins animated Reich’s
exploration of traditional musics from Africa and Indonesia and, eventually, his
embrace and study of Judaism and Jewish cultural practices (including Hebrew
biblical cantillation).92 The political implications of that flight, which reverberate
in the markedly different experiences of black, other nonwhite, and white lives in
the United States during the five decades after Four Organs was conceptualized
and composed, make urgent the imputation of plausible markers of the work’s
contemporaneity.93 And yet, Reich remains elusive when discussing many of his
vernacular influences. In contrast to his ethnographic source material, which
he often identifies either in publications or to himself in sketchbooks, the com-
poser has tended to discuss popular musical influences only in general terms,
describing the transmission of ideas with the phrase “in the air.” For example,
he notes, “In rock and roll Junior Walker had a tune called ‘Shotgun,’ which had
one repeating bass line through the whole tune. This kind of harmonic stasis
was in the air.”94 In contrast, Reich clearly recognized early on during the con-
ceptual phase of his work on Four Organs that gradual augmentation would pro-
duce long tones in the manner of La Monte Young’s music, producing humorous
comments to that effect in his sketchbook.95 The striking difference in precision
and specificity in these two examples demonstrates the tangible consequences
of Reich’s brand of Zeitgeistgeschichte: while certain instances of intertextuality
in the composer’s music are explicitly named and attributed, others exist only in
a state of liminal potentiality, hovering on the edge of musical ineffability that
threatens to engulf their being and, with them, the hermeneutic impulse alto-
gether.96 This interpretive maneuver, however, does an injustice to the commu-
nicative richness of Four Organs, a conversation about which I hope to initiate
38 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

with the foregoing study. Upon further collective reflection, perhaps it may be
possible to reimagine and recenter the vernacular inheritances of this pivotal
work, thereby pulling it out of the air where it floats and back onto the ground,
at least for a moment.97

Notes

1. Schonberg 1973a.
2. Hexaméron exists in three versions: one for solo piano, one for piano and or-
chestra, and one for two pianos. For an informative discussion of it, see Rosenblatt
2002, 309–13. The concert also included J. C. Bach’s Symphony for double orchestra
in E-flat major, op.  18, no.  1 (published in 1781), and Bartók’s Music for Strings,
Percussion, and Celesta (1936).
3. Duckworth 1999, 303.
4. It is crucial to reiterate explicitly that there were likely internal contradictions
within this audience, including the divide between new music fans and Boston
Symphony Orchestra enthusiasts who attended the concert series. Age divisions
were probable as well:  Frank Epstein, BSO percussionist, thought that the con-
cert “attracted our normal audience” but might also have included “more young
people than normal,” given that the concert seemed to be created for and pitched
to “a younger crowd.” Aside from Epstein’s comments, however, I was unable to ob-
tain more precise information about the series subscribers or concert attendees.
Email exchanges with the author, January 31 through February 1, 2016. Thanks to
Anna Zayaruznaya for asking me to further clarify the lack of homogeneity in the
audience.
5. Potter 2000, 208.
6. See Strickland 1993, 221–22; Schwarz 1996, 70–71; Rich 2006;
Weininger 2014.
7. Weininger 2014, G9.
8. Duckworth 1999, 304.
9. Schonberg 1973b.
10. See Schwarz 1996, 70; Cross 2015, 50; Wald 2015. Thanks to Steve Rings
for mentioning that Dylan himself has recently likened his experience at Newport
to the famous riot over The Rite of Spring in Paris. Tilson Thomas seems to be the
primary narrator of the Rite-like version of this event, apparently informing Reich
of much of what happened after the fact (since, unlike the conductor, the composer
wasn’t positioned to be able to pay close attention to the crowd and was instead
concentrating on performing; see Strickland 1993, 222). Whether intentionally
or not, however, Tilson Thomas may have misremembered some of the details or
exaggerated for effect. Sedgwick Clark, who was at the concert, noted that the piece
“provoked a mass walkout, with audience members shouting at each other and at
the performers,” and then stated, “Tilson Thomas recalled that ‘One woman walked
down the aisle and repeatedly banged her head on the front of the stage, wailing
“Departing to Other Spheres” 39

“Stop, stop, I  confess.’ ” Another quote had her banging a shoe. I  wonder how he
could have heard her: I was sitting about a third of the way back from the stage in
the left parquet section with Joan La Barbara, who performed in two of these cur-
rent Maverick concerts, and can attest that after 10 minutes it was impossible to hear
the music over the uproar.” Clark’s comments appear on the Musical America blog
at www.musicalamerica.com/mablogs/?p=4449, accessed July 13, 2017. La Barbara
stated that Tilson Thomas’s description of the concert may have been slightly
“amplified” (personal communication, October 28, 2016) and later confirmed that
Clark “gave an accurate commentary. MTT’s comment most likely came after the
fact as he was describing the event and the outrageous reactions. If a woman came
down and banged her head or a shoe on the stage, I’m sure we would have noticed
(even if she couldn’t be heard). People marching up and down the aisles, enraged,
with umbrellas was de rigueur for concert protests. I recall similar reactions to the
Avery Fisher Hall premiere of John Cage’s Renga with Apartment House 1776 [in
November  1976]” (personal communication, August 6, 2017). If minor untruths
were involved here, however, one can only imagine they were well-intended, with
the goal of promoting Reich’s music at a crucial juncture in his emerging career.
Thanks to Will Robin and Alex Ross for tracking down and sharing Clark’s quote;
many thanks to La Barbara for corresponding with me about this concert. For a con-
temporaneous article describing the Cage concert protest mentioned by La Barbara,
see Hughes 1976.
11. This comment was also mentioned by Strickland 1993, 221. Barry Shank,
Edmund Campion, and Richard Taruskin emphasized to me that the uproar was
likely provoked by the out-of-place context of the work’s performance on this oc-
casion (it was usually performed in the gallery/downtown scene, with audience
members often stoned or tripping, etc.).
12. For the most impressive examples of US-centric, minimalism-directed
histories of late twentieth-century music, see Taruskin 2005, 351–410; Ross 2007,
515–91.
13. Anderson 2013, 106.
14. See Fink 2005b: “Rather than abuse these critics, I want to use them, to gather
clues about minimalism as a powerful cultural practice from those who would prefer
to see it as a pathological cultural symptom” (19).
15. Timings in this and later section headings in this chapter refer to the re-
cording Reich 2009 (1970); measure numbers to Reich 1980a.
16. Hartenberger 2016, 13; Cotter 2002, 388. Indeed, Hartenberger includes an
interview comment by Reich in which the composer agrees that this may be the in-
fluence on him and discusses Moondog’s performances with his invented percussion
instrument, the “trimba,” and a single maraca, which he played simultaneously while
accompanying his singing. In several recordings of Moondog’s “madrigals” by the
composer, Reich, Philip Glass, and Jon Gibson made in either 1967 (as per Reich and
Hartenberger) or, more likely, in the summer of 1969, on June 4 (Scotto 2013, 171),
we hear a constant maraca pulse throughout, as part of a syncopated groove in 5/4
(“Be a Hobo,” “I Came Alone into This World,” “Trees against the Sky,” “Why Spend
40 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

the Dark Night with You,” “All Is Loneliness”) or 7/4 (“My Tiny Butterfly”). (Four
of these recordings are reproduced on the musical album accompanying Scotto’s
book.) Interestingly, Reich also initially notes in his sketches for the piece that would
become Four Organs on August 25, 1969, that a single maraca should be used—akin
to Moondog’s practice—and then suggests two maracas might be used in a hocketed
way. (The final composition combines both approaches—two maracas doubling the
same pulsed part.) Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basel, Switzerland), SSR, Sketchbook [1],
August 25, 1969, entry, p. 78. Thanks to Pwyll ap Siôn for first alerting me to the
reference in Hartenberger’s book, and thanks to Robert Scotto and Hartenberger for
corresponding with me on these matters.
17. Everett 2009, 20.
18. “Magic Bus” is also based on the Bo Diddley beat. The opening of Four
Organs also recalls rock percussion introductions with quarter-note attacks more
generally, a good example of which is Love’s rendition of “My Little Red Book”
(1966), which begins with a tambourine opening quite similar to the opening of
Four Organs. Thanks to Anthony Kaczynski for this comment.
19. Thanks to Russell Hartenberger for this observation.
20. BSO percussionist Frank Epstein noted that Reich himself requested that
four maracas players should perform the piece, that the percussionists did hold
the maracas horizontally to eliminate the backbeats, in accordance with the score,
and that the tempo was set by the conductor with input from the composer. All of
which points to the likelihood that the results of the BSO performance were in ac-
cordance with Reich’s wishes at the time; the composer may have been accommo-
dating given the new circumstances (i.e., new performers and a different performing
arrangement), and/or he may have used the opportunity to experiment with dif-
ferent approaches to the piece. Email exchanges with the author, January 31 through
February 1, 2016.
21. Thanks to Jocelyne Guilbault for reminding me that the maracas could also
be read as African/African-diasporic shaker instruments, rather than rock maracas.
22. Michael Veal, personal comment during a question-and-answer session,
1 December 2017. Providing contexts for some of Reich’s encounters with Native
American cultural practices, Kerry O’Brien has also noted that the composer visited
the American West and Southwest during the 1960s, including a four-day trip to
Colorado with Dean Fleming and John Baldwin in the summer of 1966 and visits for
several weeks in subsequent summers to the New Buffalo commune in Taos, New
Mexico, co-founded by his ex-wife Joyce Barkett and poet Max Finstein. (One im-
portant motivation for Reich was to spend time with his and Barkett’s son, Michael).
Indeed, his lengthy stay in New Mexico in 1968 provided the opportunity for his
collaboration in Over Evident Falls with William Wiley and other artists in Boulder,
CO, resulting in Pendulum Music. See Potter 2000, 174–75. In a personal communi-
cation (on October 25, 2018) O’Brien mentions correspondence from Dean Fleming
that “describes spending four days in Colorado (with John Baldwin and Reich in the
summer of 1966), dancing with members of Ute tribe, and handing out Park Place
buttons.” A letter from Dean Fleming to Paula Cooper, July 1966, is in the Park Place
“Departing to Other Spheres” 41

Gallery Art Research records and the Paula Cooper Gallery records, 1965–1973,
Archives of American Art, Washington, DC.
23. Grimes in Reich 1987a, 31.
24. Trynka 1996, 33. Indeed, one might fairly describe the ensemble as Reich’s
garage rock organ quartet. Reich (in Cott 1997) does mention that younger musicians
describe this composition as his “punk piece” (34) and also points out that the piece
“does have a wake-up quality. First of all, the piece is played on four screaming rock-
and-roll organs, so the timbre is like talons on your ears. The high frequencies as-
sault you” (33). That said, Steve Rings has pointed out to me that the use of the
electronic organ, particularly by 1970, can’t help but evoke the other, more explicitly
psychedelic appearances of organs in instrumental freak-out jams of the late 1960s—
one immediately thinks of the Doors and Ray Manzarek’s Vox in tracks from 1967
like “Light My Fire” and “Break On Through (To the Other Side)”; Iron Butterfly’s
Doug Ingle’s Vox in “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”; or even the Hammond organs played
by Booker T. Jones in Booker T. and the M.G.’s, Jimmy Smith, Georgie Fame and The
Blue Flames, and numerous others. Although some of these tracks and passages (es-
pecially those by the Doors) also feature modal two-chord progressions that are not
so different from Reich’s, the instrumental jams here are nonetheless quite different
in effect when compared with Four Organs: specifically, the improvisational and ec-
static temporality of examples like the Doors’, which use short riffs that vary as part
of quickly intensifying passages lasting a minute or two, is quite different from the
much slower, systematic, and almost machine-like transformations of Reich’s music
at this time.
25. It is worth considering that this work involves the first appearance of the
bass register in the composer’s music since Oh Dem Watermelons; the works of the
middle to late 1960s were decidedly midregister music. Interestingly, the bass keys
on the Farfisa (which can be octave-shifted down for a deeper bass range) are limited
in range to just under an octave—although Reich’s mobile bass lines even well after
this composition were relatively restricted, often holding onto notes for a long time.
Nonetheless, perhaps the organ’s range restriction encouraged a very simple use of
the bass register.
26. It may be that these artifacts were caused by slow warming up of the
keyboard’s transistors. Admittedly, the Farfisas may not be at fault: the effect could
be a result of the interaction of the keyboards with the amplifiers and the acoustics of
the performance space, or, most probably, the result of tape print-through. Thanks
to Walter Everett, Neil Newton, David Novak, and Ed Sheehan for their comments
on this point.
27. Jazz composer and arranger Dean Sorenson described the Oh Dem
Watermelons chord as an “A7 sus add 3,” and hence might describe the Four Organs
chord as “E9 sus add 3.” Email exchange with author, January 19, 2009.
28. Cott 1997, 33.
29. Ibid. Aaron Johnson has pointed out to me Monk’s “second and lift” tech-
nique: of his playing a dyadic second, perhaps as the upper part of a larger chord (es-
pecially with the upper fingers of the right hand), and rotating the hand to the left to
42 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

sustain the lower note of the dyad—so, for example, sustaining the fourth finger while
releasing the fifth. This suggests that Monk’s influence may have been relevant not only
to the construction of Reich’s chord but also to the treatment of the G♯–A dyad and
its quasi-resolution. Not knowing Monk’s music especially well, I haven’t encountered
many versions of the chord in his recordings. It does appear in versions of “Lulu’s Back
in Town,” including that on the album It’s Monk Time (1964) at roughly 2:56, as a ca-
dential chord before the resolution to the dominant flat-ninth at the end of the solo
piano introduction. (Here, it is heard in a cluster version similar to Ex. 1d.)
30. Quinn 2014. The “talismanic” role he attributes to the word “watermelon” in
Reich’s sketchbooks might also be an elaborate (and racially problematic) in-joke,
given its source: his music for Oh Dem Watermelons, a short, somewhat surrealist
experimental film which treats the watermelon as a racially charged signifier and
which was originally screened as part of the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s A Minstrel
Show, a politically and racially confrontational reworking of the nineteenth-century
blackface minstrel show (see Gopinath 2011).
31. See the discussion in Levine 1995, 46. Levine notes, “In the 1960s, a growing
acceptance of dissonance led pianists and guitarists to play sus voicings with both
the 3rd and the 4th.” But, as with Kelly’s chord, Levine states that in these chords “the
3rd is always above the 4th,” unlike Reich’s chord. Many thanks to Benjamin Givan
for this reference.
32. Although my prose description of the “Maiden Voyage” chord can be abbre-
viated as Mm7/9sus4 or m7/9sus4, it is typically given the simplified jazz-theory label
sus4 or sus or is otherwise described as a “slash chord” (using the formula “[chord]/
[bass-note]”). Apropos of the latter case, the chord in Ex. 1.1g could be labeled as
D/E, because is voiced like a D major triad in the right hand subposed by E in the
bass (which is reinforced by B, the fifth above E) and played by the left hand. (See
Levine 1995, 45–46.) Indeed, the use of these chords in the pulsed chordal attacks in
“Maiden Voyage,” as well as the pickup figure discussed later, make it a particularly
strong reference point for Four Organs.
33. That said, Santana’s “Oye Como Va” makes use of repeated Dorian i7 organ
attacks (as part of a i7–IV7 harmonic loop; this could also be heard as a repeated,
unresolving tonal ii7–V7) quite comparable in effect to the opening of Reich’s com-
position. (Santana’s recording is from 1970, released after the completion of Four
Organs, although Tito Puente’s original, which maintains the same harmonic gesture,
is from 1963.) Thanks to Henry Spiller for this observation. And, lengthy, suspended
extended tertian sonorities (with an initially descending half-step oscillation), com-
parable to the Four Organs chord and performed on a Vox electronic organ, can be
heard in the first six minutes of John Cale’s Sun Blindness Music (1965).
34. Taruskin 2005, 378. It is worth mentioning that higher prime number met-
rical groupings (i.e., above three) are rare in Reich’s music in the 1960s through
1970s. After It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and up to (and including) Music for 18 Musicians
(1976), consistent higher prime number divisions can only arguably be found in
Come Out (1966), which can be transcribed in 7/8 (but need not be). See Gopinath
2009, 128–30. This changes in the late 1970s, however; for example, Octet (1979) is
consistently in 5/4 (or 10/8); see Pwyll ap Siôn’s chapter in this volume for an ex-
tended discussion of that piece.
“Departing to Other Spheres” 43

35. It is worth mentioning that Russell Hartenberger, one of the early performers
of the piece, did not hear the opening groove this way, although he emphasized
that the performers were mainly concentrating on getting the rhythms correct and
staying together (personal conversation, August 2015).
36. It may be possible that the meter was partly inspired by the Grateful Dead’s
“The Eleven,” which was released on Live/Dead (1969)—about which Phil Lesh,
Reich’s long-time friend and erstwhile musical collaborator, had corresponded with
the composer. Recorded in January through March 1969, Live/Dead was released
on November 10, 1969. Reich’s first sketch for Four Organs, called “The Gradual
Stretch,” dates from October 19, 1969, and it includes the opening eleven-beat pat-
tern. Reich may have known about the song and/or received an advance copy of the
album (or recording); or, it may simply be a coincidence. Interestingly, the 11/4 parts
of the song are divided as 3 + 3 + 3 + 2, suggesting a triple meter with one beat cut
off on the fourth measure. This is rather different from Reich’s piece, with its implic-
itly duple subdivisions. Much of the Grateful Dead track, however, is in 4/4; it may
therefore be that Reich’s metrical scheme recombines and rethinks “The Eleven.”
Thanks to Neil Newton for reminding me of this track.
37. Manuel 1985, 252–54. Manuel shows transformations of the habanera’s con-
tredanse rhythm and danzón’s cinquillo rhythm into the tresillo (250–52).
38. Cohn 2016, 4.3.
39. The tresillo figure, however, is much more explicitly presented in the bass
part of the Meters’ 1975 version of the song, on their album Fire on the Bayou. For a
more recent example, the theme song to the television show Treme is also based on
the tresillo rhythm—explicitly signaling the song’s New Orleans-ness.
40. Stewart 2000, 306–7. One crucial factor that makes these rhythmic patterns
comparable to those in minimalism is the fact that this music is unswung and, as
Stewart argues, was part of a trend in the 1960s away from swing in US popular
music. Reich’s music (as well as Glass’s, most of Riley’s, etc., and most classical
music) is not swung.
41. The continuities between various Afro-Caribbean rhythms, including the
tresillo, are discussed by Washburn 1997; using a geometric music-theoretical ap-
paratus, Toussaint (2013, 214–15) connects the tresillo to a broader swath of world
rhythms (including African and African-diasporic ones).
42. Synthesizing numerous sources, Biamonte 2014, 6.4 (example 8) distinguishes
between the 3 + 3 + 2 tresillo rhythm and the 3 + 5 Charleston rhythm (from Cecil
Mack and James P. Johnson’s “The Charleston” [1923], which helped to inspire the
dance craze of the same name). Clearly, in the abstract, the two rhythms are very
closely related, with the latter lacking the final attack of the former (although that at-
tack can remain implicit). (Washburn 1997 also makes this connection [67–68, 71].)
Because of the specific associations of the Charleston with that song and the 1920s
dance craze, as well as its performative particulars, it seems preferable to call this
rock 3 + 5 pattern a “simplified rock tresillo” rather than a “rock Charleston.” (The
Charleston requires a relatively fast tempo—usually well above ♩ = 200 if one were
to count 3 + 5 in one measure of a normative 4/4 meter—and is very frequently if
not always swung.) For several examples of simplified and unsimplified rock tresillo
patterns in 1980s pop/rock, see Traut 2005.
44 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

43. Although it does not serve as an influence on the composition due to its
release date later in 1970, the potential parallel is nonetheless worth mentioning,
particularly in light of Starr and Waterman’s (2003) trenchant comment on Brown’s
own minimalist approach to R&B/soul music: “One additional and fascinating as-
pect of Brown’s work is the relationship it suggests to the ‘minimalist’ music by
avant-garde ‘art-music’ composers, such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich, that was
developing simultaneously if independently in the late 1960s in New York. This was
also music based on repetitive rhythmic patterns with a de-emphasis on traditional
harmonic movement. There is no issue of direct influence here, one way or the other.
But it could be argued that only old cultural habits and snobbery have kept James
Brown out of discussions of minimalism in scholarly forums and journals” (273).
If there was an influence, however, it’s more likely that Brown’s early funk tracks af-
fected Reich’s music, rather than the other way around. Thanks to Robert Fink for
suggesting this James Brown song as a reference.
44. A  significant difference between these examples and the Reich owes to
the fact that the former fit within a clear meter (4/4), leading to accent patterns in
playing, whereas the maracas in Four Organs are probably not supposed to impose
or reinforce accents in the organ parts (in performances I’ve seen and participated
in, the maracas player has always striven not to add extra accents).
45. Paul Sacher Stiftung, SSR, Sketchbook [1], October 28, 1969, entry, p.  84.
Underneath some completed sketch measures of Four Organs appears the incom-
plete melodic fragment A5/A4 A5/A4 G4 A4—A4 G4. They are all eighth notes, the
last two separated from the first group by a blank gap, and all appear on the same
nearly empty treble staff after a bar line (there is a three-sharp key signature, as
with the preceding music). If we hear it in 4/4, it is reminiscent of “You Really Got
Me,” except that it is a half-step sharper (The Kinks’ song is in A♭/G♯) and the last
A4 should be an eighth rest (although a prominent snare attack appears there). That
said, this sketch is more likely an unfinished measure, resultant pattern, or other
notated musing.
46. For more on the background to the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate, see Kerry
O’Brien’s chapter in this volume. Thanks to Sam Pluta for pushing me to clarify that
the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate does not perform augmentation—it just rearranges
attacks within a consistent metrical unit.
47. Although Slow Motion Sound remained a concept piece until it was later in-
corporated into Three Tales (2002), Reich did create a test version of it with technical
assistance (involving a vocoder program at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory) in the late
1960s. The test version, which can be heard at the Sacher Foundation, must be in-
cluded among Reich’s “race” pieces—for it includes the voices of a Ghanaian teacher
and student in an English class (taken from the 1967 ABC television documentary
Africa), reiterating the sentence “my shoes are new,” gradually slowing down and
transforming into discrete pitches, in accordance with the vocoding process. The
composer describes the results of that test (and his dissatisfaction with them) in some
detail in Reich 2002b, 26–29. It shows, once again, that a foundational technique for
the composer (augmentation) initially emerged from his exploration of black voices.
“Departing to Other Spheres” 45

48. Henahan 1971 includes one contemporaneous example of Reich’s mention

of this enthusiasm in print; also see the 1970 program note in Reich 2002b, in which
the composer writes, “This process of augmentation was suggested by the enor-
mous elongation of individual tenor notes in Organum as composed by Perotin and
others in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Paris at Notre Dame Cathedral.
Tenor notes that in the original chant may have been equivalent to our quarter- or
half-notes can take several pages of tied whole-notes when augmented by Perotin or
Leonin” (50). Thanks to Charles Atkinson for his queries on this point.
49. Tape speed-up effects were very common, but there are also a few examples
here and there of slowdowns, such as the tape slowdown–induced glissando toward
the end of the Hollies’ “Dear Eloise” (1967); mentioned in Everett 2009, 351.
50. As heard on Reich 2009 (1970). The mechanism for each key in Farfisa Mini
Compact organs involves a tiered series of contacts that touch freestanding wires
arrayed vertically for each key’s organ stop or harmonic. Because the contacts don’t
touch the stop wires at the same time, a very slow key depression can produce sepa-
rate onsets for each harmonic. One might say that the attack and release events of a
Farfisa Mini Compact organ have a certain “thickness,” which might contribute to the
perception of tape reversal or back masking in key releases (particularly in combina-
tion with swells caused by slow beating—see endnote 54 in this chapter). Thanks to
Michael Gallope for sharing his knowledge of Farfisa keyboards with me. The Farfisa
Combo Compact user’s manual is available at www-personal.umich.edu/~damont/
FarfisaComboCompactCompleteUserServiceManual.pdf (accessed July 18, 2016).
51. See Ryan and Kehew 2006, 302–4.
52. In the sketches for Four Organs, Reich frequently includes countups and
countdowns for the augmenting measures, and at times includes counting “pyramids”
(stacked countups/countdowns) with each lower tier increasing by one count and
slightly displaced to incorporate new additive units (so, for example, 3 + 4 + 5 would
appear above 3 + 4 + 5 + 6, wherein the event formerly corresponding to “4” would
now correspond to “5,” and the lower level would introduce a new event with “3”—a
key release or attack). This may suggest that Reich began structuring the augmenta-
tion with a quasi-systematic process and then altered the counts if he didn’t like the
results. See Paul Sacher Stiftung, SSR, Sketchbook [2], passim.
53. Getman 2015.
54. Courage’s theme is evocative of the Mahler’s cosmic nature-space in the
opening of the Symphony no. 1 (1887–88). The variability and difficulty of tuning
Farfisas were emphasized to me by Walter Everett, and this has consequences for the
long, sustained chords at the end of the piece, which seem to pulse and throb, some-
times quite slowly, thanks to the beating effects caused by those tuning differences
(which are prominent on the original recording [Reich  2009]). The beating
periodicities vary as different combinations of notes enter and exit, as well as with
the listener’s physical location with respect to the loudspeakers (due to the stereo re-
cording). I was first alerted to this phenomenon by Saccomano 2015, 13–14, which
notes the discrepancies between the beating periodicities and the maracas perio-
dicity; many thanks to Mark Saccomano for sharing his insightful thesis with me.
46 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

55. See L.  Kramer 1990, 6; this example would be a likely unintentional
“citational allusion” (10).
56. Walter Everett noted to me the sonic similarities between Farfisa keyboards
and other electronic keyboard instruments like the clavioline, Jennings Univox, and
Ondes Martenot, some of which were used for music with space travel associations—
including the satellite-themed instrumental hit “Telstar” (1962) by the Tornadoes.
The reedy, nasal sound of these instruments is also reminiscent of the closely related
theremin, frequently used in both sci-fi and horror contexts (film, TV, thematically
appropriate songs) during the 1950s and 1960s and also, of course, in the Beach
Boys’ “Good Vibrations” (1966).
57. Countdown or counting effects linked to both space travel and nuclear det-
onation are found in Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach (1976) and with nuclear
detonation alone in Reich and Beryl Korot’s video opera Three Tales (2002).
58. Intriguingly, images of space flight are quite familiar in the annals of mu-
sical minimalism, signaling a generational preoccupation influenced by the Cold
War space race. The appearances of spaceships and rockets in Glass’s Einstein and
Koyaanisqatsi (1982) are quite well known, for example, and flight and outer space
also figure frequently in the work of Meredith Monk, as in her “Astronaut Anthem”
from The Games (1983). Brian Eno’s album Apollo:  Atmospheres and Soundtracks
(1983) comes to mind as well. Also, John Adams (2009) describes a dream he had
during the middle of a creative block; in the dream he saw an oil tanker that “rose
up like a Saturn rocket and blasted out of the bay and into the sky” (130). The image
served as an inspiration for the opening (“the powerful pounding E minor chords
that launch the piece”) of his Harmonielehre (1985). What makes Four Organs
especially striking in this company is that it significantly predates these other,
better-known, and explicitly space-themed examples and stories. For a variety of
cultural representations of the lunar landing and Apollo era, see Crotts 2014, 71–74;
Tribbe 2014.
59. See Schuldenfrei 2015, 136–37. As Etha Williams pointed out to me, one
could also read the perspectival shift as going in to the chord/Earth/material sub-
strate rather than departing from it, as in placing Reich’s materials under a mi-
croscope. Indeed, Powers of Ten features not only an augmentation in order of
magnitude, stretching from the image of picnickers at the Chicago lakefront to
the widest expanses of the universe, but also a corresponding diminution, down
to the subatomic level. Thanks to Joe Dubiel and Mary Ann Smart for comments
that clarified the problem of transcendence versus immanence in the piece and the
meaning of Schonberg’s “acoustic phenomenon,” respectively. Thanks to Gabrielle
Gopinath, who first introduced me to the Eames film.
60. Paul Sacher Stiftung, SSR, Sketchbook [1], near August 14, 1969, entry, p. 74,
bottom-right part of page, near spine. Richard Taruskin described it as a “shmoo”
from the classic cartoon strip Lil’ Abner (1934–77).
61. See Reich 1980a, [iii], and Reich 2002b, 45, for images of the performance
setup. Thanks to Christopher Swithinbank for his comments on the keyboard as a
flight console, as figured in Afrofuturist work such as the music of George Clinton
“Departing to Other Spheres” 47

and writings of Kodwo Eshun, and the notion that the performers are arranged as
if in a cockpit. Joe Dubiel also noted that the welter of cables, amplifiers, and as-
sorted musical equipment also adds to the technological aura of the performance
and might contribute to the sense of the performance space as a cockpit.
62. As discussed in O’Brien 2009.
63. This is the case when experienced by a listener who does not insist on
counting pulses during the entire piece—which, I expect, would be the vast majority
of listeners—in contrast to a performer, who must count assiduously throughout
and thus stay attuned to the subtactile pulse stream.
64. In his 1981 essay “Crippled Symmetry,” composer Morton Feldman (2000)
discusses the piece’s augmentation process and the rhythmically unmooring effect to
consider when “the juxtaposition of asymmetric proportions (all additive) becomes
the form of the composition” (135). He notes, “In Reich’s Four Organs, the rhythmic
patterns are more acoustically oriented and are based on the pitch-components of
a chord that never changes. The music begins with a 3 + 8 pattern in which cer-
tain pitches from the basic chord are then varied rhythmically. Reich’s first struc-
tural move is to . . . divide [the eleven-beat measure] into [different] patterns. What
follows is the gradual addition of more beats to the structural frame of now longer
measures . . . until Reich does away with the bar lines. As the measures grow progres-
sively longer, the oscillation of the recurring pitches can no longer be said to have
any marked rhythmic profile” (135–36). Thanks to Ryan Dohoney for reminding me
of this reference.
65. Feynman 1985, 330–37. Thanks to Madhura Gopinath for this reference. We
should also take note of Michael Veal’s argument (personal comment, 1 December
2017; also see endnote 22) that the Native American rattle-like character of the
maracas indexes initiation rites like vision quests, the latter of which are also fre-
quently combined with the use of hallucinogens like mescaline (in peyote) and can
generate out-of-body experiences. Vision quests have a complex and political his-
tory for American Indians; they seem to have expanded significantly during the
late nineteenth century, in response to the crushing and brutally violent defeats in
the American Indian Wars. For a brief discussion of contemporaneous Comanche
practices, which might be taken as representative, see Noyes 1999, 15–18.
66. For thoughtful examples of such mapping, see Whiteley 1992. In contrast,
Bromell (2000) makes a very loose and general linkage between music and drugs
(i.e., their physical immediacy), arguing, “The closely related phenomenologies
of music and psychedelics help explain, I think, why millions of young people in
the ’60s turned to these experiences as a way to work through and beyond their
conditions” (73). Also, Veal’s Native American reading of the maracas encourages
an indigenous perspective on psychedelic experience (as mentioned previously—
see endnotes 22 and 65), and perhaps evokes images of and ideas about interethnic
collaborations or conflicts—particularly as viewed from a white perspective. To put
it bluntly, if Four Organs can be read as a white fantasy of an ethnically syncretic
vision quest, what does it mean that the structuring rhythm of that quest persists,
allowing the piece to maintain its indigenous-ritual character but lose its blackness?
48 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

67. Demonstrating a now conventional linguistic link between the drug-

induced perception and the space program, Cott (1997) says of experiencing Four
Organs’ argumentation process, “People associate this feeling with being spaced out”
(34; emphasis mine). In addition, in a personal comment (December 1, 2017) Kerry
O’Brien made a point about the language of ecstasy and the word’s roots in yogic
philosophy. Reich’s thinking about somatic experience, as realized in Four Organs,
may have been tied to his yoga practice and yoga-influenced thinking in the late
1960s, which is discussed in O’Brien’s chapter in this volume.
68. Reich 2002b, 80.
69. See Lewis 1996. More generally, one might argue that late 1960s/early 1970s
America was being escaped from, with the signifiers of blackness also signaling the
counterculture (and its absorption/appropriation of black music).
70. See Tribbe 2014, 37–39. Thanks to Dalton Anthony Jones for first alerting
me to Gil Scott-Heron’s poem and recording.
71. Strickland 1993, 221. Although a simple mapping cannot do justice to
who was present at the concert and their myriad reactions to it, the clash between
detractors and musicians/supporters recalls the now mythologized 1960s–1970s di-
vision between “squares” and “hippies.” (Another homologous, but not equivalent,
divide is the frequently bandied-about uptown/downtown opposition in New York
art music of the period.)
72. Indeed, the economic decline of the long downturn was inseparable from
declines in state spending, which include the downsizing of the space program in the
1970s. See Tribbe 2014, 221–23. On the long downturn beginning in the early 1970s,
see Brenner 2006.
73. For more on interpreting Come Out, see Gopinath 2009; Potter 2000, 176–79.
74. I owe almost all of the interpretation from the beginning of this paragraph
up to this sentence to Eric Drott.
75. With this interpretation, I take inspiration from David Valentine’s reading
of Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Packing for Mars)”
(in Giovanni 2011, 1–4), in which he directly contrasts this text with Gil Scott-
Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” (as part of Valentine 2017, 195–98). In Giovanni’s
Afrofuturist interpretation of space flight and exploration, “the trip to Mars can only
be understood through Black Americans” (3), and future space travelers will need
to learn from the horrific experiences of the Middle Passage during the heyday of
the transatlantic slave trade in order to cope with the difficulties of such extreme
forms of transit. An Afrofuturist reading of Four Organs, after Giovanni, could in-
terpret Reich’s metaphorical exploration of space as a collaborative (and possibly
utopian) project fundamentally dependent on blackness and black music—or non-
white subjectivities more generally, if the indigenous reading of the maracas is in-
corporated. (Although such a reading is potentially utopian, the maracas—as the
obscured and incorporated black/nonwhite musical engine of a space vehicle, itself
perhaps figured as a chugging train, and thus acting as proverbial “hidden figures”
in this scenario—also reinscribe racialized divisions of labor in this metaphorical
journey. They suggest that this reading needn’t be understood as uniformly affirm-
ative.) As such, this reading provides a useful counterpoint to the hermeneutics of
“Departing to Other Spheres” 49

Four Organs as racial-social escape. Indeed, the escape interpretation exemplifies

Valentine’s (2016) broader point that texts and performances like Scott-Heron’s res-
onate with midcentury philosophers’ arguments that “the move to space is . . . rad-
ically decontextualizing and depoliticizing. From this perspective, the view from
space seems to concretize the generalizing and abstracting observational capacities
of [the] modern subject by obscuring the observer’s interested attachments and
conflating a subjective view of a containing atmosphere with an apparent ration-
alist objectivity” (512). Unlike these thinkers, we needn’t necessarily treat space as a
depoliticizing escape from Earth alone—space being, after all, a political project in-
separable from the Earth and its inhabitants—and should not reflexively assume the
truth of this argument. Indeed, as Valentine astutely notes, “For critics of the human
view from space, it is only by framing this view as free of context that humanness on
Earth can be meaningful” (521).
76. See, for example, Jameson 2009, 13.
77. See Tsing 2012. Thanks to David Valentine for this reference.
78. Reich claimed he thought of the maracas as an acoustic substitute for the
beat-counting “common digital clock” of his Phase Shifting Pulse Gate (Reich
2002b, 45).
79. This history is complex and cannot be recounted adequately here, but it
would seem that Wimsatt and Beardsley’s (1946) notion of the “intentional fallacy”
has been applied to considerations of musical analysis (at least as early as Treitler
1966, 80; see Haimo 1996), performance interpretation (Taruskin 1982; Tomlinson
1988), and hermeneutics (Taruskin 1997a, especially xx–xxxi), to cite a small
number of interrelated examples.
80. See, especially, Gopinath 2005, 2011.
81. See Pontara 2015.
82. For the central text, see Gadamer [1975] 2004. I  am influenced here in
particular by one of my teachers, James Hepokoski; see Hepokoski 1991 for an
important discussion of the relevance of Gadamer to Dahlhaus; and Hepokoski
and Darcy 2006, 604, for a statement of Gadamer’s hermeneutics as relevant to the
authors’ approach to the analysis and interpretation of sonata forms. Of course,
for recently created music, the “Gadamerian fix” of tradition (L. Kramer 2011,
251) can hardly be said to exist in any great depth; hence my interest in constructing
broader intertexts for interpretation (see Klein 2005). I  should additionally add
that if my method is strongly influenced by Hepokoski, the specific interpretive
observations in my arguments about Reich have long been strongly influenced
by the work and suggestions of Michael Veal, whose interpretive sensibility has
been an inspiration to me. Moreover, my approach also resonates markedly with
Jonathan Bernard’s reading of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha “chaconne,” which he
argues might be influenced by chord progressions in 1960s US/UK pop songs as
much or more than by Baroque or flamenco music (see Bernard 1995, 281 [fn44]).
Thanks to David Novak for prompting me to clarify my methodology here.
83. In Kramer’s (2016) memorable words, “Even if the hermeneutic circle does
not absolutely determine the terms on which an interpretation is arrived at . . . the
circle nonetheless does determine that only certain kinds of understanding, certain
50 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

kinds of discourse, are possible. Meanings are acceptable only if their origin falls
along the circular path, which inexorably closes in on itself, like a noose” (92).
84. Many thanks to Matthew McDonald for this observation. For helpful
discussions of the influence of Stravinsky on Reich, see Cross 1998, 170–74; Potter 2000,
154–55; Reich himself describes the chord as being found in both Monk and Debussy
(Cott 1997, 33). Richard Cohn (personal conversation, December 1, 2017) also reminds
me that there were similar resonances in the European avant-garde—especially the
dominant-ninth chord of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung (1968, first recording
released in 1970) and the spectralist tendency that was influenced by it. Reich’s chord
and composition could be further understood, alongside this European trend, as con-
temporary versions of what Daniel Harrison calls “overtonality” (see Harrison 2016,
17, 125–26 [on overtonality in the Octet], and passim).
85. I take the notion of pseudomorphism from the art historian Erwin Panofsky,
for whom the term denotes “The emergence of a form A, morphologically analogous
to, or even identical with, a form B, yet entirely unrelated to it from a genetic point
of view” (cited in Bois 2015, 127). (Panofsky uses the term differently from Adorno,
who describes Stravinsky’s music as a “pseudomorphism of painting”—a heterono-
mous, cross-medial impulse allegedly resulting in an expressionless, atemporalized,
and ahistorical form of sonic spatialization. See Adorno 2006, 141–44.) And, de-
spite countercultural sympathies for space travel in general, the Apollo program was
largely viewed as a “triumph of the squares,” a culminating achievement of the tech-
nocratic rationality of the postwar US state that would become undone by “the rise
of a neo-romantic turn in American culture” by the 1970s (Tribbe 2014, 130–31, 21).
86. See Reich 2002b, 50.
87. I  owe the observation about Baroque organs to Lauren Redhead and the
Schumann example to Steve Rings. On the Schumann passage, see Rosen 1995,
10–12. Even though the Schumann work is obviously from the nineteenth century,
one might consider that the sustained whole notes of this passage may invoke some
version of the alla breve topic and, as such, suggest an early modern or premodern
reference point at some level of mediation.
88. Strickland 1991, 35; see also 35–37, and Duckworth 1999, 314, for discussions
of Reich’s aesthetic preferences.
89. Specifically, the beating to death of Petrushka by the Moor, on which Sjeng
Scheijen (2010) comments, “It is remarkable how few commentators over the years
have mentioned the explicitly racist character of the ballet” (227).
90. See Long 2008, 124–25.
91. On the point about literary/filmic genres, see Pringle 2000. Indeed, Star
Trek’s own depiction of Vulcans as living rather monastic lives (wearing priestly
robes, having highly disciplined and austere cultural practices, etc.) is one pertinent
example.
92. See Puca 1997, 537–39.
93. Here I  am in part referencing the intrepid efforts of the Black Lives
Matter movement and the police shootings of black individuals that it protests.
For further study of this subject, see the Black Lives Matter syllabus by Frank
“Departing to Other Spheres” 51

Leon Roberts at www.blacklivesmattersyllabus.com/frankleonrobertsr/ (accessed

August 17, 2016).
94. Grimes in Reich 1987a, 10 (emphasis mine). For more recent statements
of this sort from Reich, see Wroe 2009; P. Johnson 2013. In my view, this state-
ment is somewhat misleading, in that it refers to a song that was never explicitly
quoted or otherwise employed by Reich and was, instead, used by Terry Riley in a
tape composition, The Bird of Paradise (1965)—and it is by now well known that
Riley’s tape compositions heavily influenced Reich’s own (see Potter 2000, 118,
164–65).
95. Reich demonstrates this awareness by parodying the lengthy and overly lit-
eral names of Young’s compositions, using the word “watermelon” to refer to his
extended dominant chord. See Paul Sacher Stiftung, SSR, Sketchbook [1], August 12,
1969, entry, p. 71.
96. Reich’s “in the air” model of influence recalls theories of zeitgeist, or the
“spirit of the age.” William Weber (1994) offers a critique of the latter in musical
and cultural history, observing: “The cultural history written by Americans in par-
ticular has been dominated by a passion to see the arts as a set of cultural unities”
(322), and proposes that this is an effect of history teaching. For a recent attempt to
recover Zeitgeistgeschichte by critiquing methodological individualism and consid-
ering collective historical consciousness as an emergent property, see Førland 2008.
A number of recent texts have reinvigorated discourse on the ineffability of music,
including Abbate 2004 and Gallope 2017. For a critique of some of this discourse,
see L. Kramer 2016.
97. Concerning intertextual connections to Western art music, Reich has ex-
plicitly commented on his awareness of the possible influence of Pérotin on Four
Organs, even though it somewhat contradicts his earlier accounts of this influ-
ence:  “Most of these connections occurred to me after I  did what I  did in a very
intuitive, nonintellectualized way, which is something I try to adhere to to this day.
I’d heard Pérotin before Four Organs, of course, but if there was an influence it was
unconscious.  .  .  . In general, you ought to revisit the literature and then throw it
all out the window and write your piece. Forget about it, unless you’re doing what
Stravinsky did with Pergolesi. After Four Organs, a very radical piece, I investigated
Pérotin because I asked myself, ‘Wait, am I all alone here in the ocean, or am I really
in someone else’s swimming pool?’ ” (in Strickland 1991, 37). My goal in this essay
is to make comparable connections between Reich’s work and vernacular musics of
the sort discussed previously, while at the same time recognizing the potential perils
of doing so.
2

“Moving Forward, Looking Back”

Resulting Patterns, Extended Melodies, Eight Lines, and
the Influence of the West on Steve Reich

Pwyll ap Siôn

This chapter seeks to trace the influence of the Western classical tradition on
Steve Reich’s musical language by the end of the 1970s.* While occasionally
acknowledging the influence of European music, its composers and traditions—
ranging from Pérotin in the twelfth century to Debussy and Bartók in the
twentieth—Reich has nevertheless downplayed the impact of Occidental music
on his style and aesthetic in writings and interviews, preferring instead to em-
phasize the influence of non-Western traditions, such as African drumming
and Balinese gamelan music.1 Even during the mid-1970s, when Reich re-
flected at greater length on his own musical roots and background, he turned
not to the music of Mozart and Beethoven for inspiration but rather to the
history and development of Jewish music. Indeed, according to the composer,
Jewish music provided the catalyst for his use of extended melodies in Eight
Lines (1979/1983), which provides the focus for this chapter, rather than any
Western classical considerations relating to melodic—or indeed harmonic and
formal—constructions.
Identifying Western influences in Reich’s music thus appears to go against
the composer’s own view, as summarized in the following statement:  “My
connections to Western classical music have little or nothing to do with music
from Haydn to Wagner.”2 However, Keith Potter has suggested that the late
1970s, when Eight Lines was composed, marked a “watershed” in Reich’s devel-
opment, reflecting the composer’s “rapprochement with the aims and intentions,
as well as the forces, of Western classical music.”3 This is already found in works

* Research for this chapter was supported by a British Academy Small Research
Grant awarded in 2015, followed by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2016.
Both awards enabled me to carry out research at the Steve Reich Collection, Paul
Sacher Stiftung (PSS), Basel. I  wish to thank the PSS, especially Matthias Kassel
and Tina Kilvio Tüscher, and Sumanth Gopinath and Robert Fink for comments,
suggestions, and advice on earlier drafts of this chapter. Nikki Louise Morgan and
Martin Rigby provided translations of German reviews and articles.

53
54 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

leading up to Eight Lines, such as Music for 18 Musicians (1976), which shows an
“increased debt to Western classical music in general, and its approach to har-
mony in particular.” But if 18 Musicians is, as Potter puts it, “crucially ‘on-the-
edge’ aesthetically, and technically speaking,”4 precisely what might this edge be,
and where did Reich’s music go after this point?
To assess the extent of this influence on Reich’s musical style during the
1970s, this chapter will be divided into three sections. The first section examines
Reich’s relationship and engagement with Europe during this time against the
backdrop of a reception history toward his music from critics and audiences.
The second section analyzes Reich’s Eight Lines (originally titled Octet in 1979
but subsequently reorchestrated and renamed Eight Lines in 1983), starting off
with the composer’s own exegesis, in order to demonstrate that its most innova-
tive aspect—the use of extended melodic lines—is constructed around a largely
goal-oriented harmonic (that is to say, Western) structure as much as through
Reich’s own immersion in Hebrew cantillation music. The final section seeks to
draw together both elements to show how the composer’s mature style from this
point onward can be read as a kind of synthesis of Western and non-Western
influences.

Overview: Reich in Europe during the 1970s

On March 7, 1971, Steve Reich and his ensemble played at the Institute of
Contemporary Arts, London. In addition to Piano Phase (1967), Pendulum
Music (1968), Four Organs (1970), and Phase Patterns (1970), the program also
included the first part of the composer’s most recent work, Drumming (1971).5
The London concert was followed by performances at the Centre Culturel, Paris,
the Lycée de La Source, Orléans, and the Théâtre de la Musique, Paris on March
13, 14, and 16. The dates, which also coincided with visits to West Germany
and England by Philip Glass and his ensemble, marked the two composers’ first
live appearances in Europe.6 Since these concerts were organized on a relatively
small scale, it seemed sensible and practical for both composers to coordinate
their visits to Europe, each utilizing the combined talents of musicians such as
saxophonist Jon Gibson and keyboardists/percussionists Art Murphy and Steve
Chambers.7 Glass himself also took part in some of Reich’s concerts.
Such was the response to Reich and Glass’s short tour in 1971 that further
concerts followed throughout the 1970s, each one increasing in size and scope as
promoters, festival organizers, and radio stations featuring contemporary music
took note of the new style emerging from America. Less than a year later, Reich
and his ensemble visited France, Belgium, West Germany, and England in a tour
that spanned January and February 1972, which included a concert sponsored
by Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) radio station in Cologne. The tour ended
with the first full performance of Drumming outside the United States at the
“Moving Forward, Looking Back” 55

Hayward Gallery, London, on February 4, in which several English composers

and musicians also took part, including Michael Nyman and Gavin Bryars.
Reich returned to Europe later the same year, this time with dancer Laura
Dean and her company in a tour that covered France, Belgium, Holland, Italy,
and Spain between May and July. Concerts were given at the Pro Musica Nova
festival, Bremen, sponsored by Radio Bremen’s new music director and com-
poser Hans Otte, and at the Berlin Festival organized by Walter Bachauer. There
was less activity in Europe during 1973, but Reich returned the following year
to perform in several high-profile festivals, including the Musik unserer Zeit
and Tage der Neuen Musik festivals in Stuttgart and Hannover in January 1974.
The schedule was extended to cover concerts in Switzerland, Norway, and
Sweden before the ensemble’s final appearance in Europe that year at Bachauer’s
Metamusik Festival on October 15.8
Even from such a cursory overview of Reich’s concert tours in Europe be-
tween 1972 and 1974, one can clearly identify a shift from regional and national
importance to international recognition during the middle to late 1970s. This
shift was achieved in part through Reich’s activities in Europe. The broad nar-
rative of this success may be summarized as follows: Reich’s reputation was first
established locally during the mid-1960s in the San Francisco Bay Area through
performances and collaborations with the San Francisco Mime Troupe and at
the San Francisco Tape Music Centre. This was followed in the late 1960s and
early 1970s in New York City’s downtown district with further recognition of
Reich’s work, where he became part of an active community of like-minded art-
ists, musicians, composers, sculptors, dancers, and filmmakers. The 1970s saw
Reich’s music reach beyond San Francisco and New York to European audiences
via several concert tours, festival performances, radio broadcasts, album
releases, and—toward the end of the decade—festival commissions. During the
1980s and 1990s, Reich’s music attained a global reach, with tours extending be-
yond Europe and America to Australia, Japan, and South America.
Europe’s role in bridging the gap between national coverage of Reich’s
music in the United States in the early 1970s and global success in the 1990s
is therefore an important one; but how far did this influence go, and to what
extent can it be said to have worked both ways? To what extent did European
performances of minimalist music serve to secure Reich’s international pro-
file and popularity? What roles did European commissioning bodies and
individuals play in supporting this music and legitimizing it both in Europe
and back home in America? Was Reich influenced by Europe to the same extent
that he influenced Europeans? Did the European tours, the record deals, and the
festival commissions change Reich’s style or aesthetic in any way? Is it easy to
overestimate the importance of Europe in Reich’s career?
Certainly, by the mid-1970s the pendulum had swung toward Europe for
Reich and Glass. Sumanth Gopinath even suggests that by this time Reich had
“extricated himself from the neo-avant-gardist community,” with which he had
56 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

been associated during the late 1960s, “in order to more fully establish him-
self as a professional composer, instead of being seen as a fringe experimental
artist.”9 Reich’s need to assert his credentials as a composer coincides with
his early success in Europe, and the support—ironic in the opinion of some
critics—that soon followed from European institutions and promoters. For ex-
ample, in his preface to Wim Mertens’s book American Minimal Music—the
first book of its kind on the subject (translated into English in 1983)—Nyman,
a tireless supporter and proselytizer of American minimalism during the early
1970s, wrote, “Paradoxically, such a quintessentially American and seemingly
anti-European music has been largely supported and fostered by European
institutions.”10 Americans were also picking up on the situation. In an article
in Newsweek in April 1984, entitled “The Yanks Are Coming,” critic Alan Rich
confidently proclaimed that it was a triumphant time for American composers
in Europe. Rich rightly observed that many of Reich’s and Glass’s major works
between 1976 and 1984 were “the result of European commissions,” going as far
as to say that Europe’s lack of “hero-composers” was partly responsible for this
situation.11
Rich’s article focused on the more or less simultaneous world premieres of
three large-scale works in major European centers by Glass and Reich within
the space of eight days (Reich’s The Desert Music and Glass’s operas Akhnaten
and the “Rome” section of Robert Wilson’s epic the CIVIL warS)—a concate-
nation of events that demonstrates at a glance the extent to which American
minimalism now dominated European contemporary music culture. Maarten
Beirens has seen this process of commissioning new minimalist works by
European institutions as marking the third “phase” in Reich’s popularity during
the 1970s, with live performances and record releases issued by European labels
forming the first two phases.12
Eight Lines was in fact one of Reich’s first European commissions. Evidently,
by the end of the 1970s, Europe had become a source of substantial income
and support for several American composers. But is there more to it than this?
Not so, according to Reich, whose response on the matter over the years has
remained unequivocal, having stated many times that “the difference then and
now is the organization and sponsorship of the arts in Europe as opposed to the
U.S.”13
If, by the 1980s, the demand for minimalist music from European audiences
was pushing concert promoters and festival organizers to support it, back
in the early 1970s critical reception to early Reich and Glass tours was more
mixed. This music had its supporters, of course, including the aforementioned
Nyman in England, Daniel Caux in France, and Hans Otte and Bachauer in
Germany.14 There was praise from certain quarters of the music press, too. For
example, reviewing Reich’s Pro Music Nova concert in 1972, which featured the
German premiere of Drumming, Simon Neubauer wrote enthusiastically about
“the magic of repetition” (“Die Magie der Wiederholung”), while Fritz Piersig
“Moving Forward, Looking Back” 57

referred to the work’s beautiful impression (“hübschen Eindruck”).15 Potter

sums up the situation as follows:

[Music] critics began to write more consistently about Reich in the early
1970s. Daniel Caux’s enthusiastic review of the composer’s 1971 Paris con-
cert assisted the [Shandar LP recording of] Four Organs and Phase Patterns
which helped raise his music’s profile, in Europe as well as in the USA.
Michael Nyman championed his cause in Britain. Major exposure later that
year at West German festivals in Bremen and Berlin helped consolidate
Reich’s position, at least on the avant-garde scene, despite the hostility his
works still sometimes created, including the psychological and social, as well
as musical, difficulties some in Germany had with music so devoted to a reg-
ular pulse.16

But, as noted by Potter in his final sentence, Reich’s music continued to provoke
some extreme responses, especially in the German-speaking press. Adjectives
such as “primitive,” “boring,” and “monotonous” were often used to describe his
music.17 These descriptions were not uncommon in English-language reviews
too, of course.18 However, German critics also seized upon other aspects, in-
cluding what they identified as the music’s mimetic representation of industrial
production and machine-like processes. Worse still, some went further and ac-
cused Reich of creating a form of musical fascism that “suppressed social criti-
cism and manipulated the listener’s emotions.”19 The composer was clearly aware
of such unwelcome comparisons after his ensemble’s first European tour, stating
the following in an interview with Donal Henahan in the New York Times in
October 1971:
Certain people look at music that is totally controlled, written out, as a met-
aphor for right-wing politics. But I’d suggest that the kind of control I try to
exercise on myself and other musicians who play this music is more analogous
to yoga. These are two different conceptions of control—the one imposed from
without, the other maintained from within.20

Despite Reich’s own defense, some German critics continued to apply the term
“Faschistisch” to his music. While Helmut Lesch, music critic for the Allgemeine
Zeitung, merely implied it indirectly by referencing other critics (“ ‘Faschistisch’
ist allerdings in den Augen sogenannter Avant-garde-Kritiker auch die Musik
von Steve Reich”),21 Dietmar Polaczek, writing in the Süddeutschen Zeitung, and
other like-minded critics were more willing to voice their own views on the
matter. In his 1972 review of the Pro Musica Nova festival, Polaczek frames the
“problem of new American [minimal] music” in terms of its “mechanical pre-
cision,” which, he argues, renders its form meaningless. He goes on to say that
its focus on psychoacoustic elements encourages a kind of “mindless” sound
immersion (“Versenkung in den Klang”), concluding that its “totalitarian
organisation”—through the music’s assault on the senses—turns anarchy into a
58 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

form of “fascistic [or ‘fascistoid’] terror” (“die Anarchie in faschistoiden Terror

umschlägt”).22
Polaczek’s comments may not have represented the majority view, although
it is interesting to note that as early as 1966, Reich’s tape compositions had
been compared to “the fan belts of large machines.”23 Such opinions gathered
pace, however, before finally culminating in 1975 with the publication of Clytus
Gottwald’s polemical essay “Signale zwischen Exotik und Industrie.”24 In es-
sence, Gottwald’s claims contained nothing new, but they were given added im-
petus and legitimacy by being published in a scholarly journal and clothed in
pseudophilosophical discourse.25 Drawing on the theories of Theodor Adorno
and Max Horkheimer, Gottwald maintained that Reich’s music was “anti-
intellectual,” it simulated “a continuous performing machine” (“lückenlos-
funktionierenden Apparat”), and its processes “dehumanized” the performer. In
sum, it exhibited fascist and totalitarian traits.26
Unsurprisingly (although also untypically, since it was uncommon for
Reich to respond directly and publicly to such accusations), Gottwald’s diatribe
prompted a swift and robust riposte from the composer in the pages of the same
journal a few months later.27 In an open letter, Reich inferred that Gottwald’s cri-
tique could only be understood in terms of Germany’s attempts to make sense
of its own identity as a nation during the postwar period, stating that his re-
action was “principally rooted in Germany’s national ‘guilt complex’ resulting
from the Second World War.”28 Furthermore, the composer strenuously denied
any fascist-style coercion in his music. After all, performing and listening to any
music is largely a matter of personal choice rather than necessity.
The two eventually resolved their differences, with Reich even reworking an
earlier composition for Gottwald’s Stuttgart-based Schola Cantorum ensemble
in 1981.29 However, a sense of distrust regarding Germans’ perception of his
music continued to rankle with the composer, as illustrated in the following
comments given in an interview some years later:

I would say my music is basically misunderstood in Germany, and still is.

I think my music is as far away from the Germanic musical tradition as it is
possible for music to be, and they have never, I think to this day, figured out
what my music is really about.30

Did these criticisms elicit a response or reaction from Reich? Is it merely co-
incidental that at precisely the same time that Gottwald penned his controver-
sial article on Reich’s “mechanical” music, the composer moved away from the
rigid, process-based compositions of the late 1960s and early 1970s toward an
aesthetic that liberated his music from such strict structures and gave prece-
dence instead to beautiful sounds?31 Could the development of this new style—
as illustrated in almost everything Reich wrote after Music for 18 Musicians—be
seen as a response to these criticisms? And could such a response have sub-
consciously taken on more Western-style forms and influences to counteract
“Moving Forward, Looking Back” 59

such accusations of “dehumanization” and “totalitarianism”? These questions

will now be addressed in relation to Reich’s Eight Lines, first by focusing on the
composer’s own comments on the new function of melody in this work followed
by an analysis of its harmonic and modal design.

Analysis: Eight Lines

Commissioned by Radio Frankfurt and premiered by members of the

Netherlands Wind Ensemble under Reinbert de Leeuw on June 21, 1979,
Octet (now better known as Eight Lines, as mentioned earlier) was one of two
European commissions received by the composer during this time, marking a
departure from works written specifically for his own ensemble.32 Despite its
moderate dimensions, Eight Lines has remained an important work from the
middle period of Reich’s oeuvre.33 Reflecting on the work in an interview with
Ev Grimes some eight years after its first performance, the composer stated that
Eight Lines “[is] one of the most successful pieces I have ever done; period,” a
view supported by many, including members of Reich’s own ensemble. In the
same interview, the composer recalled how “Russ[ell] Hartenberger, who is
much wiser than any music critic I ever met, said ‘Well, I think [Eight Lines]
wins that batch [over Music for a Large Ensemble and Variations for Winds,
Strings, and Keyboards].’ ”34 Potter also refers to Eight Lines as “the work which
its composer singles out as representing possibly the major point of change,” in
Reich’s thinking about structure, melody and harmony, in addition to “the new
importance it gives to instruments of the standard Western classical orchestra
and to variety of timbral resource.”35
As Potter’s comment suggests, Eight Lines’ more or less standard instru-
mentation of piano, strings, and winds—“shorn of Reich’s much-loved mallet
instruments,” in K.  Robert Schwarz’s words—partly explains its appeal to
musicians and ensembles.36 Its increased technical demands, especially for the
ensemble’s two pianists, have also been noted. William Austin talked about
the “need for stamina” in order to perform the piece; Schwarz went further,
characterizing the work in terms of its “relentless virtuosity.”37 Certainly the two
pianos’ function (whose dovetailing patterns, according to Reich, provided an
indirect homage to boogie-woogie) radically extends the phase relationships
first explored in the much earlier Piano Phase, also written for two pianos (see
Ex. 2.1a and 2.1b).38 The former’s well-known opening pattern covers less than
an octave (E4 to D5, a minor seventh higher; Ex. 2.1a), while its equivalent
pattern in Eight Lines spans fully four octaves within the space of a mere four
quarter-note beats (Ex. 2.1b).39
In fact, the opening ideas contained in both pieces are also closely connected
in pitch content:  the five pitches that are heard during the first part of Piano
Phase (reordered as B–C♯–D–E–F♯, suggesting either transposed Dorian or
60 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

Example 2.1a and 2.1b Comparison of the opening piano lines in Piano Phase (1967)
and Eight Lines (1979).

(a)

(b)

Aeolian) are also found in the opening six pitches in the left-hand pattern of
piano 1 in Eight Lines, this time transposed up a tone (C♯–D♯–E–F♯–G♯, with the
addition of a B). The right-hand pattern comprises the same set of pitches as
the left, transposed up a perfect fifth, therefore creating a series of parallel fifths
between both hands.40
This brief comparison of the openings of Piano Phase and Eight Lines
demonstrates at a glance how far Reich’s musical language had transformed
between 1967 and 1979 in rhythmic complexity, virtuosity, and expansion of
register, while also showing that he continued to draw on similar modal and
tonal patterns. Eight Lines’ ability to balance existing techniques from earlier
compositions with forward-looking elements is an important feature of the
work. The combination of such “consolidatory” and “innovative” elements
in Reich’s music have occasionally been the subject of the composer’s own
reflections. In an interview with Nyman in 1976, Reich explained his creative
development in terms of a kind of zigzagging motion, where an innovative piece
might be followed by a consolidatory one:  “Having written Music for Mallet
Instruments [Voices, and Organ], it was possible [for me] to go back and write
[Music for Pieces of Wood, for five pairs of tuned claves]; once having written the
claves piece, it was possible to wait for two years and come up with Music for 18
Musicians.”41
Other consolidatory and innovative features belong to Eight Lines. In its adop-
tion of a two-tiered texture that pits busy, pattern-based motion in pianos and
winds against more fluid, sustained motions in strings, Eight Lines’ consolidatory
elements connect it with Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ (1973),
which also sets up similar binary oppositions between slow-moving chords in
“Moving Forward, Looking Back” 61

female voices, organ, and metallophone with more active movement in the ma-
rimba and glockenspiel parts. The process of substituting beats for rests, heard
in the clarinet parts in various sections of Eight Lines, relates back to numerous
compositions such as Drumming (1971) and Six Pianos (1973), while Eight
Lines’ use of rhythmic augmentation in the string parts can be traced back to
Four Organs (1970).42
However, by far the most discussed element in Eight Lines has been Reich’s
use of extended melodies. This arguably represents the work’s most striking
and innovative departure. Up until Eight Lines, melodic elements in Reich’s
music were based on short patterns or musical cells, which—when combined
contrapuntally—yielded longer patterns (or, at least, less repetitively obvious
ones), which the composer referred to as “resulting [or resultant] patterns,” a
discovery that went back to Violin Phase (1967).43 While these patterns were
constructed more or less freely in the early works, they increasingly took on a
more prescribed character of “composed melody” and were soon incorporated
by Reich as part of the compositional process itself.44 The next obvious step was
therefore to transform these resulting patterns into clearly discernible melodic
lines. This is what Reich does in Eight Lines.
The composer himself has added weight to the importance of melody in this
work, especially in relation to the cantillation (or chanting) of Hebrew Scriptures.
In his 1979 note on Eight Lines, Reich sums up the situation as follows: “[This]
interest in somewhat longer melodic lines, composed of shorter patterns strung
together, has its roots in . . . my studies in 1976–77 of the cantillation . . . of the
Hebrew Scriptures.”45 In an article originally published in French in 1981 on
Hebrew cantillation as an influence, Reich elaborates on these connections.46
Toward the end of the article he attributes the influence of cantillation to the
melodies heard at various points in the flute and piccolo parts. This piece of
“poietic” evidence will now provide the starting point for a more in-depth anal-
ysis of Eight Lines.47
Reich starts off by focusing on the last few measures of Eight Lines (begin-
ning at rehearsal number 74 of the score), as heard in the flute and piccolo (see
Ex. 2.2, which, for ease of reference, contains only the flute and piano 1 parts).
As Reich explains, the flute line’s opening melody starts off by merely
reinforcing the top line in piano 1 (“The first 2 bars of the Flute double Piano
1’s right hand more or less exactly”).48 By incorporating notes that already
belong to the piano 1 part, the following two measures in the flute adhere to
Reich’s technique of generating resulting patterns from a contrapuntal weave of
already-existing lines. After this point, however, the relationship between the
flute melody and repeated patterns in pianos 1 and 2 becomes less clear:
The second two bars of the Flute begin with the first 4 notes again from Piano
1, but the Flute diverges from the rest of bar 3 and all of bar 4 into notes taken
from Pianos 1 & 2, together with several that do not exist in either piano part.49
62 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

Example 2.2 Flute melody and piano 1 part in Eight Lines, rehearsal 74A.

The final four measures of this section draw freely from previous patterns.
Reich states that these extended melodies have not been generated by
resulting patterns, however, but rather by applying the principle of Hebrew
chant, which he explains as follows:
Since the two piano part is only two bars long . . . the flute and piccolo take
the two-bar piano part and, by putting shorter motives together, create 10-
bar melodies in counterpoint. Although the sound of this music is not at
all like Hebrew cantillation, its construction in the flute and piccolo parts
“Moving Forward, Looking Back” 63

resembles the construction of motives in Hebrew chant. It is a small influence

but a real one, and interesting in that it lends itself to further and unforeseen
developments in the future.50
Nevertheless, the precise influence and function of Hebrew cantillation on
Reich’s melodic construction have been more difficult to assess, since the
composer’s own comments are applied only in a general sense. Some writers
have simply taken Reich’s comments at face value, merely reproducing the
composer’s description in their analysis.51
What would happen if the same section were analyzed not so much in terms
of Reich’s own exegesis but rather according to the composer’s own tried-and-
tested compositional methods, namely, as a development of his method of
creating resulting patterns? Example 2.3 represents the flute melody plus the
combined lines of pianos 1 and 2 in this section (piano 2 plays the same pat-
tern as piano 1 but starts three quarter-note beats after piano 1). Differences in
register between piano and flute have been retained here. As Gopinath points
out, “One extension of the resulting patterns technique is an assumption [by the
composer] of octave equivalence, or its application to pitch-class instead of pitch,
which was the primary determinant in earlier works.”52

Example 2.3 Combined piano 1 and 2 parts and flute melody in Eight Lines, rehearsal 74A.
64 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

The first two and a half measures merely confirm Reich’s own analysis, but
when he states that “the Flute diverges from [the piano lines for] the rest of
bar 3,” it is possible at this point to relate all four pitches—E♭, A♭, F, and E♭—to
pitch classes that appear in the combined piano parts. Reich states that “all of
bar 4” diverges from “notes taken from Pianos 1 & 2, together with several that
do not exist in either piano part,” but again it is possible to relate all the flute
pitches to the piano parts, apart from the first two pitches in measure 4. These
two pitches, which reverse the opening D♭–A♭ dyad in piano 1, are the only ones
that don’t relate to a specific piano pitch, yet both pitches are heard in the violas,
forming part of a continuous bed of sustained string textures heard throughout
the work.53 Example 2.3 demonstrates that all the flute notes in this section can
be related either to pitches in the combined piano parts or to notes sustained in
the strings, as resulting patterns of one kind or another.54 From the analysis of
this section, Reich’s use of extended melodies can be claimed to have emerged as
an extension of the technique of generating resulting patterns from the combi-
nation of canonic lines as from his studies of Hebrew chant.55
However, if we now turn to the first iteration of melodic lines heard during
the opening section of Eight Lines, it becomes more difficult to apply the same
“resulting patterns” rule. As shown in Example 2.4, the first extended melody
is heard at rehearsal 11, around two thirds of the way through the first sec-
tion. Relating this flute melody to resulting patterns in the piano parts proves
more difficult. Example 2.5 shows the flute’s melody in relation to the combined
piano lines as was done earlier in Example 2.3. Many of the flute’s pitches can be
derived from the combined piano lines, but by no means all of them. The fol-
lowing breakdown of the flute’s pitches in measures 1 through 4 illustrates the
situation: no D♯ in the combined piano lines, B is there in the combined piano
lines, no C♯ (but this pitch does appear in the violin part), no A♯; G♯, D♯, and B
are there, and C♯ is present in the strings. In measure 2, no A♯ in the combined
piano lines, G♯ is there in the strings, D♯ and B are there, and C♯ again is present
in the strings. In measure 3, no D♯ in the combined piano lines, B, D♯, and C♯
are all there in the combined piano lines, A♯ is absent, C♯ and B are present in
the combined piano lines. In measure 4, all the notes are there in the combined
piano lines.
In fact, in measure 5 (not included in Ex. 2.5), only two flute notes (A♯ on
the fourth quarter-note beat and F♯ at the beginning of the fifth) correspond to
pitches heard in any of the other parts. Clearly there are too many anomalous
pitches here to suggest that Reich formed these melodic lines from the resulting
patterns of lines generated in the two piano lines and strings. If these lines (and
many others from Eight Lines) are not derived from resulting patterns, where do
they come from?
Now might seem an appropriate moment to reflect further on the role Hebrew
cantillation played in generating the work’s melodic content, as Reich himself has
claimed. Robert Fink suggests that Reich found confirmation of the principle of
Example 2.4 Extended melody in flute in opening section of Eight Lines, rehearsal 11.

Example 2.5 Combined piano 1 and 2 parts and flute melody in Eight Lines, rehearsal 11.
66 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

generating continuous melodic lines from limited sets of short motivic units in
Hebrew formulas for chanting the Torah through studying Jewish cantillation
during the mid-1970s. Chants were assembled from small motivic units called
“tam” (pl. ta’amim), which—using hand gestures given by the person leading the
singing group—also resembled a fixed number of cell-like motives. Thus, can-
tillation appears to explain most accurately why these melodic lines diverged
from the underlying harmonies. Furthermore, the short melodic figures of the
Ashkenazic tradition that Reich encountered during his studies of Jewish sacred
music sound not unlike the motivic units repeated in Eight Lines’ flute melodies.
Fink has proposed that Reich systematically changed the order of the notes he
took because that would make the local tam aspect work, and that aspect had
become more important to the composer than the old “resulting melody” idea.
A case of “this is a new motivic discipline, and it takes over from the old one.”56
However, if everything melodic functions as a trace of what is already acous-
tically present in the surrounding contrapuntal texture, what precisely is present
in Eight Lines? To apply the principles underpinning Hebrew cantillation to his
music, Reich still had to compose the work with some form of harmonic basis
in mind. Example 2.6 sets out the work’s five main sections in terms of intercon-
nected tonal or modal regions, providing a birds’-eye view of the work’s tonal
motion while also considering the sudden harmonic shift that occurs just after
the midway point of the piece, halfway through the third section.57
As shown in Example 2.6, Eight Lines’ overall harmonic motion establishes
a thirds-based relationship that starts on C♯ and ends a minor third lower, on
B♭. (This is indicated in the example by the large bracket that runs underneath
all six chords.)58 The thirds-based relationship is also mirrored on a smaller
scale. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, for a composer of tonal predilections, each har-
monic region is constructed out of a series of stacked minor or major thirds, all
of which relate to either a major or a minor thirteenth chord. The prominent
role that minor thirds play in the overall harmonic makeup of Eight Lines may
help explain the work’s dark, serious, and somewhat intense character. The only
sections built on major thirds are at the beginning of part 3—whose sudden fall
from G♭ major down a minor third to E♭ minor contains its most unexpected

Example 2.6 Tonal regions in Eight Lines.

“Moving Forward, Looking Back” 67

moment—and then at section 4, which is based on D♭ major. However, the work

starts and ends with two minor thirteenths, on C♯ and B♭ (their relationship, as
already noted, being a minor third). Within these two polarities, thirds-based
relationships are also articulated between sections 4 and 5 and, of course, quite
dramatically within section 3, as mentioned previously.59
The work’s fifths-based relationships are also important, of course, on both
micro and macro levels. The “open fifth” sound is the work’s fingerprint and
is heard eight times in piano 1’s two-measure figure at rehearsal 4: in the left
hand, twice ascending C♯–G♯, harmonized in the right hand G♯–D♯ an octave
and a fifth higher, and both ascending then descending on the B–F♯ dyad
(see Example  2.4 for all eight iterations of these fifths). Ronald Woodley has
described these stacked fifths as “pivoting on central semitones,” and he goes on
to suggest that “this symmetrical field gradually becomes destabilized” across
the work’s five sections.60 Observed from a more traditionally tonal perspec-
tive, this fifth-based relationship suggests a kind of free “Rondo,” with section
4 representing an enharmonic return to the tonic (the C♯min13 of section 1 be-
coming D♭maj13 in section 4).
Viewed in a slightly different way, these harmonic pillars also generate a net-
work of modally derived scalar collections, which provide each section with
its acoustical presence, as shown in Example 2.7. This example sets out each
harmonic entity as linear, scale-like patterns that—through the canonic rela-
tionship established between the two piano parts in each section—create a se-
ries of interlocking modal combinations. (These canonic relationships are also
found in the patterns that are built through rhythmic construction in the clar-
inet and bass clarinet entries in sections 1 and 3, respectively.) The first two
seven-note combinations are at the fifth, reflecting a kind of tonic-dominant
modality that, as observed previously, relates to the first two sections. The third
shows a canonic relationship at the sixth—the furthest between the two pairs
of interlocking parts—resulting in the greatest harmonic disruption when the
relationship is “flipped around” halfway through the section. The final two
combinations—representing the canon at the fourth and third, respectively—
bring the two parts closer together, effecting in the centricity of the material a
kind of modal resolution.61

Example 2.7 Scalar combinations in Eight Lines.

68 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

These modal regions are, respectively, transposed Dorian (down a semitone

to C♯ from D) in section 1; transposed Dorian (up an augmented fourth to G♯
from D) in section 2; transposed Lydian (up a semitone to G♭ from F) in sec-
tion 3; transposed Ionian (up a semitone to D♭ from C) in section 4; and, fi-
nally, transposed Aeolian (up a semitone to B♭ from A) in section 5. In effect,
these modal regions provide each section with a kind of bimodality: section 1
combines the first five pitches of C♯ minor with the first five of G♯ minor; sec-
tion 2 the first five of G♯ minor with the first five of D♯ minor; section 3 the first
five of G♭ major with the first five of E♭ minor; section 4 the first five of D♭ major
with the first five of G♭ major; and, finally, section 5 the first five of B♭ minor
with the first five of D♭ major. Viewed in this way, the final section of Eight Lines
does signal something of an enharmonic return to the opening section, with C♯
minor resolving onto D♭ major.
How, then, do these scalar combinations help explain how Reich—via his im-
mersion in Hebrew cantillation leading up to the composition of Eight Lines—
came to construct the extended melodies found in it? While determining the
melodic pitch content in relation to resulting patterns proved difficult in the
analysis above, when the modal properties of each section is set out, as illustrated
in Example 2.7, the work’s melodic material can now be seen to be generated out
of the mode that constitutes each section. Example 2.8 shows this in relation to
the first five measures of the flute’s melody in section 1.
The flute melody is thus derived from a transposed version of the Dorian
mode starting on C♯: every note in this melody can be related to the scale.62 In
fact, drawing further from these observations, it is possible to see each mode as
a subset that belongs to a larger nine-note set comprising the work’s entire pitch
content (see Ex. 2.9).63

Example 2.8 Flute melody and matching mode in section 1, rehearsal 11.

Example 2.9 Nine-note set in Eight Lines.

“Moving Forward, Looking Back” 69

Example 2.9 highlights the inherent diatonic dichotomy that pulls Eight
Lines back and forth between major and minor centers (especially in sections 3
and 5), providing the work with its ambiguous tonal color. The first five pitches
of the nine-note set suggest F♯ major, while the final four belong to C♯ minor.64
The latter is also an octatonic tetrachord. Eight Lines’ innovative quality is not
so much contained in the extended melodies themselves but rather in the way
they are formed from a set of harmonic pillars—and a resulting “progressive”
tonality—which generates a series of scalar combinations. These combinations
are themselves formed out of a nine-note “Mother Mode,” part major and part
minor in design. Such harmonic pillars are not unfamiliar to Reich’s thinking,
of course—immediately calling to mind Music for 18 Musicians with its opening
cycle of eleven chords—but the difference here is that these chords are implied
rather than stated explicitly. The chords are linearized in Eight Lines—quite lit-
erally linearized in the case of the flute and piccolo’s melodic lines.65

Conclusion: Reich and the Western Classical Tradition

Goal orientation and tonal resolution; modal shifts and modulations; extended
melodic lines and abrupt harmonic shifts—all these elements suggest a com-
poser willing to adopt and embrace Western classical principles rather than
eschewing them. Reich’s early compositions reveled in relationships set up be-
tween figures and patterns on the surface, reflecting minimalist artist Frank
Stella’s dictum, “What you see is what you see.”66 Nevertheless, while working
on Drumming during the early 1970s, Reich started incorporating Western
classical elements into his music. In an interview with Russell Hartenberger on
composing Drumming, Reich concludes that he was “going to have to write a fi-
nale, an old Western finale,” adding that “moving forward from Drumming is re-
ally the beginning of moving back towards more traditional ways of thinking.”67
Eight Lines’ harmonic design, goal-oriented tonal construction, and melodic
invention also indicate a move toward “traditional ways of thinking.” Still, Reich
continued to maintain that his “connections to Western classical music have
little or nothing to do with music from Haydn to Wagner.”68 He has readily ac-
knowledged the influence of early and mid-twentieth-century composers, such
as Bartók and Janáček, and the former’s regular use of the 5/4 time signature and
of formal structures based on five sections, is perhaps one of Eight Lines’ most
evident features.69 But the impact of the West appears to go deeper here, beyond
the work’s surface appropriation of Bartókian features or its more traditional
orchestration of pianos, strings, and winds.70
How should Reich’s appropriation of Western classical elements be read?
Was it an unconscious response to the criticism his music received during the
1970s, especially from German quarters? Was it an attempt to form a kind of
American-European synthesis? In his book The Anxiety of Influence, literary
70 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

critic Harold Bloom proposes a method of reading poetic texts based on poets’
practices of consciously or subconsciously resisting poems that mark their place
in the canon of poetic works.71 According to Bloom, poets and novelists—or in-
deed composers—mark out their own creative and aesthetic space through this
act of resistance and creative defiance. Does Eight Lines—and other works by
Reich dating from this period—represent a particular kind of Bloomian “anx-
iety of influence,” where the composer actively resists and represses the influ-
ence of the classical tradition, only for it to leave its trace on his music at a
deeper level?
What other tropes are articulated in this way? Gopinath has suggested that
the shapes and contours of the flute and piccolo patterns in Eight Lines some-
times resemble Baroque patterns and figurations, while the sustained string
lines, which shift seamlessly between perfect fourths or fifths, are chorale-like
in effect, oscillating between B♭ and A♭ at the end of the work in what sounds
like a prolonged “dominant” chord in D flat major.72 Thus the work’s intertex-
tuality can be seen to embrace a number of Western traditional elements, from
Baroque figuration and classical goal orientation to suggestions of octatonicism
found in Stravinsky and Bartók.
Where, then, among this “European” reading of Eight Lines, can we locate the
influence of Hebrew cantillation? Reich’s decision at this moment to analogize
his change of abstract instrumental techniques to Hebrew liturgical practice can
be explained partly through his reconversion to Judaism, whose roots are buried
deep in European history. Reich was clearly ambivalent about Europe. It was, on
the one hand, the site of the Holocaust; but on the other, it demonstrated over
and over a commitment to the arts that Reich valued and praised. In drawing
his music closer to Jewish traditions and practices—albeit in terms of spirit
more than sound—Reich again sought to draw himself away from Europe, the
Western classical tradition, and its influence.
The relationship between, on the one hand, the trope-like melodies, resulting
patterns, and scalar combinations heard in Eight Lines and, on the other, Hebrew
cantillation is possibly far closer. These fusions become blurred precisely be-
cause of their relatively high level of stylistic compatibility with each other.
Reich’s utilization of the cantillation technique is more nuanced and integrated
because it sits more comfortably within a style that is, by this time, fully formed
and mature.
Of course, Reich’s Oedipal struggle with a “precursor text” (or in this case a
“precursor tradition”) should not be viewed negatively. He effectively transcends
the Western tradition by actively resisting its power. He masks its influence by
drawing equally on other non-Western traditions—African, Balinese, Jewish,
jazz, and so on. In doing so, the very notion of a Western art-music style and
tradition is questioned and interrogated. What emerges is not American, non-
Western, or European but a beguiling synthesis of each one.
“Moving Forward, Looking Back” 71

Notes

1. On the influence of European composers, see, for example, Reich 2002b,

160; on the influence of non-Western music, see Reich 2002b, 69–71; see also Martin
Scherzinger’s and Michael Tenzer’s chapters in this volume.
2. Reich 2002b, 160. These comments are also echoed in an interview with
Amy Beal (see Beal 2006, 201).
3. Potter 2000, 152.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 198.
6. In fact, Reich’s tape pieces had already received European premieres prior
to these performances—It’s Gonna Rain in Bern, Switzerland, in March 1969, and
Come Out in York, England, in October 1970. Reich’s Piano Phase had also been
performed in London and Brussels in October 1969 by Frederic Rzewski and Alvin
Curran, and as early as May 1968 in Tokyo, Japan (see Reich 1974, 73).
7. Potter 2000, 198.
8. For a detailed list of performances by Philip Glass and Steve Reich during
the early 1970s, see, for example, Chapman 2013a, 247–90.
9. Gopinath 2011, 187.
10. Nyman in Mertens 1983, 8.
11. Rich 1984, 76–77.
12. Beirens 2005, 160.
13. Quoted in Beal 2006, 198.
14. Nyman’s first interview with Reich, conducted in May 1970, was published
in the Musical Times in March 1971 (see Reich 2002b, 52–55). During this time,
Nyman also wrote about Reich’s music in Time Out magazine, New Statesman, and
Music and Musicians (see ap Siôn 2013, 119–20, 125–26, 222–25).
15. Neubauer 1972; Piersig 1972.
16. Potter 2000, 209.
17. See reviews written around this time by Schröder 1972 and Bach 1972.
18. In a particularly disparaging review in the New  York Times in 1973,
Schonberg described Reich’s Four Organs as “non-music . . . baby stuff, written by an
innocent for innocents” (1973a).
19. See Beal 2006, 200; on “machine music,” see, for example, Jungheinreich
1972. See also Kerry O’Brien’s chapter in this volume.
20. Henahan 1971. For more on Reich and Yoga, see Kerry O’Brien’s chapter in
this volume.
21. Lesch 1972.
22. Polaczek 1972. Thanks to Sumanth Gopinath for drawing my attention to
the ambiguous nature of “faschistoiden” here.
23. Moore 1966.
24. Gottwald 1975.
25. Shelley suggests that “Gottwald saw and heard features that Cage would
likely have termed fascist” (Shelley 2012).
72 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

26. For a detailed examination of Gottwald’s article, see Kutschke 2004; 2007,
260–87.
27. See Reich 1975.
28. Shelley 2012.
29. A recording of this work, Mein Name Ist . . . (Portrait der Schola Cantorum,
1981), which was based on My Name Is (1967), was released on Bauer Records
in 1993.
30. Beal 2006, 201. One could, perhaps, understand Reich’s comments in re-
lation to Gottwald, Polaczek, and other German critics writing in the 1970s, but
to tarnish all Germans with the same brush seems dangerously close to notions of
biological essentialism that could be related precisely to the kind of totalitarian ide-
ology from which Reich was anxious to distance his own music.
31. For more on creating beautiful music, see Reich’s 1976 interview with Nyman
(in ap Siôn 2013, 329).
32. The other work, Music for a Large Ensemble (1979), was also premiered at
the same concert.
33. As its title suggests, Eight Lines’ companion piece, Music for a Large Ensemble,
was for a larger group, while the Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards (1979)
was large-scale both in length and in instrumentation.
34. Grimes in Reich 1987a.
35. Potter 2000, 151.
36. Schwarz 1996, 86.
37. W. W. Austin 1991, 1300; Schwarz, 86.
38. In his interview with Ev Grimes, Reich states that Eight Lines “came out of
the two piano writing which by the way struck me as a kind of boogie-woogie or a
homage to boogie-woogie, and turned out to be the hardest piano parts I ever wrote,
and I wrote myself out of the piece that way” (Grimes in Reich 1987a). Thanks to
Sumanth Gopinath for pointing this out to me.
39. Those who have played the pattern, and others form Eight Lines, will have
been immediately struck by the sheer physicality—the rapid shifts up and down the
keyboard—involved in playing it. It is no surprise that Reich, more a percussionist
than a pianist, effectively wrote himself out of the piece as a result.
40. Eight Lines’ modal makeup and fifths-based relationship will be discussed
later, when its “tonal” trajectory is analyzed in more detail.
41. Unpublished passage from Michael Nyman’s transcript to his interview with
Reich in La Rochelle, France, in June 1976. Thanks to Nyman for access to the tran-
script and permission to use it.
42. However, unlike Four Organs, which expands almost exponentially, the
string augmentations in Eight Lines are all contained within a ten-measure, grid-like
template.
43. For a discussion of the use of resulting patterns in Violin Phase, see Reich
2002b, 26; see also Potter 2000, 189–92.
44. This is confirmed to an extent in Reich’s sketches, where—in addition to
writing out the audible lines of the music—the composer adds a “composite” part
“Moving Forward, Looking Back” 73

underneath the score, a kind of super-part containing all the notes from the indi-
vidual parts. However, the notion of “writing out” these resulting patterns formed
part of the performance practice behind Reich’s music from as early as Drumming.
See Hartenberger 2016, 53–55.
45. Reich 2002b, 99.
46. Originally published in Reynaud 1981; first published in English in Reich
2002b, 105–18.
47. A term coined by Jean-Jacques Nattiez in his semiological model for musical
analysis, “poietic” broadly refers to those aspects of a work that relate to the “process
of creation.” See Nattiez 1990, 11–12.
48. Reich 2002c, 114.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. See, for example, Puca 1997, 537–55.
52. Personal correspondence, December 28, 2016.
53. The idea of retrograding this dyad is in fact already implied in the piano’s
two-measure pattern, which reverses the two sets of fifths in measure 2.
54. This is also the case with the other extended melodic line in the piccolo part,
which is constructed along similar lines to the flute’s.
55. Further evidence of this is to be found in Reich’s sketchbooks, held at the
Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel. The most complete draft of Eight Lines, dated
January 24, 1979, and entitled “Octet or Septet,” appears in Sketchbook [17].
Page 2 of the sketch includes, in addition to lines written out for two clarinets,
two pianos, two violins, and two cellos, two staves that contain the resulting
patterns emerging from these combined lines. The fact that Reich went to the
trouble of including all these lines under one composite part indicates that he
was fully aware of the various permutations that could be generated from the
panoply of resulting patterns.
56. Email correspondence with the author, September 29, 2015.
57. My analysis differs slightly from the only other previously published har-
monic analysis of Eight Lines by Woodley (2007, 468–70), to which I shall return
shortly.
58. In fact, Woodley hears the ending of Eight Lines as “a nearly fully tonicized
D flat major, though ultimately unresolved in its simultaneous sounding of tonic,
dominant, and subdominant elements” (Woodley 2007, 470). Harrison sees
the opening harmony of Eight Lines as based on an inherently stable and static
‘amplified tonic’ with added notes (or ‘colouring agents’ as he describes them).
See Harrison 2016, 125–6.
59. Of course, it is possible to reconfigure these chords in such a way as to place
emphasis on their major rather than minor characteristics, as each thirteenth is
formed out of two simultaneously sounding minor and major sevenths, such as C♯
minor seventh and B major seventh in section 1. A similar feature emerges when the
chords are treated as subsets of a mode, too, as shown later.
60. Woodley 2007, 470.
74 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

61. I believe that this sense of tonal resolution does come across in performance,
with the piece ending as opposed to simply stopping, as was often the case in earlier
minimalist works.
62. The claim made here—that Reich’s melodic lines are built on the same di-
atonic material as the accompanying parts—is neither especially original nor en-
tirely surprising. However, it does support the notion that Reich’s use of extended
lines evolved from questions and concerns that had preoccupied him from at least
Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ (1973) and Six Pianos (1973) on-
ward, therefore suggesting stylistic and aesthetic continuity rather than a sudden
shift triggered by his studies of Hebrew cantillation.
63. It is interesting to note in relation to this nine-note scale that three pitches
are entirely absent from Eight Lines: D, G, and A.
64. There is also a suggestion of the octatonic scale here, anticipating more overt
examples of its use in works composed during the 1980s, such as The Desert Music
(1983) and Sextet (1985).
65. Whether Reich conceived Eight Lines in such harmonic terms remains
unclear. As far as I’m aware, the chords set out in Example  2.6 (or anything that
might resemble them) do not appear in the composer’s sketches, while the chords
appearing at the beginning of Music for 18 Musicians can be found there. (For more
on the latter, see Keith Potter’s chapter in this volume.) It could therefore be argued
that the modal generation of melodic material, as found in Eight Lines, is more in
line with a Western classical understanding of musical form and structure.
66. Stella’s well-known quote may be found in Bernard 1993, 106.
67. Quoted in Hartenberger 2016, 84. Intriguingly, this is a comment that Glass
also makes about the penultimate section of his opera Einstein on the Beach, which
he describes as a “razzle-dazzle” finale (in Gagne and Caras 1982, 216). Thanks to
Sumanth Gopinath for drawing my attention to the Einstein connection.
68. Reich 2002b, 160.
69. More recent examples of 5/4 appropriations in jazz and contemporary music
may be found in the music of Moondog, such as “All Is Loneliness” (whose music
Reich recorded with Moondog and others in the late 1960s) or saxophonist Dave
Brubeck’s recording of Paul Desmond’s “Take Five.” Thanks to Sumanth Gopinath
for these observations.
70. Gopinath has suggested that the presence of the flute, which does not appear
in Reich’s music until the late 1970s (the only exception being the use of a piccolo
in parts 3 and 4 of Drumming), does “conjure up the kind of pastoral associations
linked to that instrument (and their frequent appearance in classical orchestral
music).” He goes on to say that “one might think of its presence in late 1970s Reich
as one marker of his rapprochement with Western classical instrumentation and
orchestras, and sonically central to the sense that Reich from the 1970s on would
sound less aggressively harsh and extreme.” Email correspondence with the author,
July 21, 2017.
71. Bloom (1973) 1997.
72. Email correspondence with the author, December 15, 2015.
3

Different Tracks
Narrative Sequence, Harmonic (Dis)continuity, and
Structural Organization in Steve Reich’s Different
Trains and The Cave

Maarten Beirens

Many consider Different Trains (1988) to be a pivotal moment in the evolu-

tion of Steve Reich’s music. The reasons for this are numerous. First, it uses a
standardized “classical” medium—the string quartet—albeit not in a standard
way. In its use of recordings of speaking voices, it also reconnects with an im-
portant feature of his early tape compositions. Perhaps more important, it is
the product of Reich’s first encounter with the digital sampler, opening up
possibilities of including all types of everyday sounds in his music and blending
these into a musical texture involving speech, ambient sounds, prerecorded
instruments, and live musicians in a kind of postminimalist musique concrète.
The significance of Different Trains is encapsulated in Reich’s own words, that
it began “a new way of composing” for him.1 On a deeper level Different Trains
also provided some novelties: it included a remarkable autobiographical element
and unfolded a narrative, constructed by joining together different statements.
Reich has compared this approach to a documentary; indeed, subsequent works
such as The Cave (1993) and Three Tales (2002) developed a similar approach of
collecting statements from interviewees, combined with video images, weaving
them together into a narrative sequence that has been described as “documen-
tary music theater.”2
However, one of the most fascinating aspects of Reich’s turn toward sampled
speech from Different Trains onward is the emergence of a different approach
to harmony. The sudden modulations between often distant harmonic regions,
coupled with brisk tempo changes, originated as a necessary by-product of Reich’s
new compositional approach. These harmonic fluctuations followed the pace and
pitch content of the sampled speech melodies but soon grew to become powerful
musical devices in their own right. In this way, two elements lie in paradoxical re-
lationship with each other. On the one hand, one sees Reich’s desire for harmonic
coherence and even stasis, as exemplified in his output before 1987; on the other
hand, one hears sudden shifts from one harmony to the next in the montage-like
structures of his sample-based compositions from 1987 onward. One can safely
assume that the particular challenge of those compositions for Reich was to shape

75
76 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

an overall large-scale structure in which the narrative sequence of the individual

samples, the piece’s dramaturgy, coincided with at least some degree of establishing
coherence on the level of harmonic structure. The important question, then, is to
what extent do harmonic and narrative elements provide separate (or perhaps
parallel) means of structural organization? To what extent are they combined into
a shared sense of unity? In other words, with the simultaneous arrival in Reich’s
music of a narrative structure and greater harmonic variety, does the nature of the
music’s dramatic structure now move more prominently to the surface?
This problem—if one may call it such—as manifested in Different Trains, is
actually the result of a single phenomenon. In taking speech fragments from
interviews and using the inherent speech melodies as basic musical material,
Reich was trying to find a way of combining the dramaturgy of the spoken texts
with the pitch material (and tempo) contained within those words, exactly as
they were pronounced. In the absence of time-stretching software, Reich was
forced to adapt the overall tempo and harmony to match the pace and pitch con-
tent of each individual sample. From Three Tales onward, he decided to resort to
time-stretching, which—through developments in computer technology—was
more reliable and user-friendly, enabling the composer again to work in larger
sections that remained in the same tempo and/or harmonic region. As Reich
explained in an interview with Paul Hillier:

The basic assumption in The Cave, and Different Trains, too, was that the music
would follow the speech melodies of the speakers exactly. As they spoke, so
I wrote. This was completely in keeping with the subject matter; the Bible and
the Koran in The Cave and the Holocaust in Different Trains. I felt it would be
inappropriate to electronically manipulate the speakers in those pieces. But
when I finished The Cave, I felt I had gone far enough in the direction of having
the music determined by speech melodies of those interviewed—so many fast
changes of tempo and key. I wanted to use documentary material again, but
make the music take the lead instead of following.3

Two significant points emerge from Reich’s statement. First, he describes the
unaltered use of the samples as a matter of ethics. The integral use of the sample
would preserve, as it were, the “integrity” of the speaker, whose statement/
melody was nonetheless integrated into the overall narrative of the piece. This
approach connected with the concept of the documentary and the kind of ob-
jectivity associated with it. Yet the “testimonial aesthetics” involved were prob-
ably never as neutral or objective as Reich intended them to be. In an article that
re-examines the statements from Jewish Holocaust survivors in Different Trains,
Amy Lynn Wlodarski has shown that this purported objectivity can never be to-
tally achieved, as layers of interpretation, preconceived ideas, leading or loaded
questions, views and opinions, and so on inevitably crop up in documenting
and shaping testimonials.4 The transfer of such highly personal statements into
a larger narrative is bound to cause at least some friction.
Different Tracks 77

Secondly, Reich admits that the fast montage of samples with their different
tempos and harmonic content necessitated a different approach, especially in
relation to harmonic structure. Introducing a more rapid rate of harmonic
movement led him to build a harmonic language based on change rather than
stasis. This move was unprecedented in Reich’s music, and his return to a more
evolved sense of harmonic continuity from Three Tales onward demonstrates
the profound impact that working with sample-based material had on his mu-
sical thinking. This challenge is most apparent in Reich’s approach to form and
structure, balancing between the narrative sequences of selected samples on the
one hand and harmonic structure on the other, which was inextricably related
to the pitch material of those very same samples.
The question, when the music was not “taking the lead,” then, is as
follows: How does the musical structure operate within this dramaturgically de-
fined framework? In order to answer this, this chapter will examine two types
of structuring devices in Different Trains and The Cave—two compositions in
which the sample-by-sample fragmentation of harmonic material is most ap-
parent. The first section of this chapter will briefly examine the narrative struc-
ture that results from the selection and ordered sequence of samples. The second
section will look at the harmonic structure and propose some hypotheses on how
certain small- and long-scale harmonic devices operate as structuring features,
where the music is seen to be “taking the lead.” While some observations will rely
on music analysis and close reading, this chapter will also draw on Reich’s sketch
material and source recordings held at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel (PSS).
The PSS acquired the Steve Reich collection in 2008, thereby making a large
number of sketch materials, recordings, and computer files available for schol-
arly study for the first time.5 However, the amount of material available for con-
sultation varies from work to work. For Different Trains, the materials held at the
Sacher collection cover the entire working process, from audio source recordings
(out of which the samples were taken) to manuscript sketchbooks and draft
scores (mostly computer printouts with or without handwritten corrections),
in addition to computer files.6 This allows for a reasonably complete account of
Reich’s working process. It covers the gradual shaping of the material and the
form, from the composer interviewing his former governess Virginia Mitchell
and retired Pullman porter Lawrence Davis right through to the finalized score.
The situation is different regarding The Cave. The video recordings containing
the source interviews from which the samples were drawn are not part of the
Reich collection at the PSS. Unlike Different Trains, reconstructing the transi-
tion of the sampled phrases from raw interview material to the recontextualized
narrative of the composition is not possible at present. Nevertheless, the
sketchbooks and draft scores do provide a great deal of information about the
shaping of the work’s structure on the level of musical material and harmony.
One final word about the rate of harmonic change in Reich’s music. When
admitting to the feeling that he had “gone far enough in the direction of having
78 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

the music determined by speech melodies” the composer indicates that he

found the experience of the music needing to follow the pitch content of the
vocal samples a somewhat uncomfortable one. His expression of relief at the
prospect of including time stretching to make “the music take the lead” again is
immediately illustrated by a description of those two elements that would imply
a musically satisfying outcome for the composer: steady tempo and harmonic
continuity.
While Reich’s approach to pitch or harmonic content in his early works is
sometimes considered “minimalist”—the five pitch classes that make up the
entire first part of Piano Phase (1967), for example, or the single dominant
eleventh chord that occupies the entire duration of Four Organs (1970)—his
later works do include a far greater sense of harmonic variety. Some have even
traced Reich’s development from minimalist to postminimalist composer in
terms of an increasing emphasis both on harmonic structure and on the prom-
inence of chord changes.7 Music for 18 Musicians (1976), with its cycle of eleven
chords underpinning the entire large-scale structure of eleven sections is often
considered as the catalyst in the composer’s shift toward a harmony-based
structure.
With this work Reich also prioritized complex chords, involving—as Keith
Potter has demonstrated—harmonic ambiguity as well as longer-term harmonic
coherence through voice leading,8 which Robert Fink sees in terms of sexually
grounded tension-release metaphors.9 Still, the interaction between tonal areas
dates back at least to Six Pianos (1973), and even the four movements of the
epochal Drumming (1971) can be said to use modulations in order to articu-
late a larger-scale plan.10 In retrospect, the treatment of pitch material in the
earliest phase-shifting pieces may also be interpreted in terms of harmonic mo-
tion. Potter, for one, discerns an implied “ii-V-I” progression in A underpinning
the three sections of Piano Phase (1967), although he adds that its harmonic
structure is “heavily qualified by modal ambiguity.”11 From Octet/Eight Lines
(1979) and onward through the 1980s, Reich’s harmonic language significantly
expanded, with the composer placing greater emphasis on modulation and a
faster rate of chord changes, leading to increasingly complex and ambiguous
harmonies.12
Nevertheless, in works such as Tehillim (1981), The Desert Music (1983),
Sextet (1984), and Electric Counterpoint (1987), there remained a sense of
longer-term harmonic continuity or even some aspect of stasis. Neither the ar-
rival of abrupt harmonic changes nor the types of chords involved in Different
Trains were unprecedented in Reich’s music. However, they did stand out be-
cause of their suddenness, their relatively fast rate of change and less apparent
sense of longer-term unity or consistency. Such harmonic changes also reflected
the fragmentary approach found in Reich’s montage-like assemblage of short
personal accounts into a compound narrative (Different Trains) or the retelling
of a biblical narrative through a variety of commentaries (The Cave). It is the
Different Tracks 79

shaping of this narrative that becomes the most salient feature in articulating the
piece’s structure. So before turning our attention to the harmony, a few remarks
should be made about Reich’s selection of the words and voices.

Mapping Out a Plot

Among the many early sketches and documents relating to Different Trains,
the Sacher Foundation holds a computer file of a text document entitled
“Kronos Piece Notes” in which Steve Reich collected diary-like dated entries
with observations regarding the ongoing compositional process for this piece.13
Ostensibly, the document served a rather practical purpose, since it contained
many short remarks that were clearly intended to list outstanding tasks.
But at the same time the diary records several observations about the work,
documenting Reich’s ideas, intentions, and even initial doubts, as well as pro-
viding the researcher with a good basic chronology of its progress. Tracing
Reich’s thoughts can be particularly revealing at the very beginning of this pro-
cess, when the composer was still figuring out the best way to integrate new
sampling technology and deciding how to approach the narrative topic. As an
insight into the composer’s first efforts at working with a plot-driven structure,
based on documentary material, these notes, combined with the sketch mate-
rial, are illuminating.
The very first entry contained therein, dated December 28, 1987, describes
the setting of what was to become the first text sample14 and continues with the
admonition in capitals: “MOST IMPORTANTLY GET ALL AUDIO SOURCES
AND ORGANIZE THEM INTO OVERALL FORM OF PIECE!” It serves as
a strong indication that in the conception of Different Trains the selection of
text fragments came first, organized into an overall form before actually setting
them to music. How these samples might be combined musically is described in
the next entry, dated January 4, 1988:

“In 1939” begins to sound like something—at last! This suggests sections of
each movement built around one or more speech (or sound) samples which
suggest musical patterns, in case of speech, or just tempo and “character” in
case of engine sounds. Train whistles become long tones over engine, rails or
speech fragments.

The following entries all concern the selection of sources. At that point, Reich
had only collected speech samples from his former governess Virginia Mitchell.
The next few entries list possible sources for more material:  American and
European train sounds, Holocaust survivors, a Pullman porter working the
same lines that Reich had traveled on as a child. By January 28, a statement in
Reich’s dairy indicates that he had collected all the sources required for the work
(the final source being the interview conducted with retired Pullman porter
80 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

Lawrence Davis in Washington, DC, the previous day). The entry concludes
with a summary of the sources for the first movement, which he has to “start
and organize.” These are both train sounds (identified as “engine, crossing bells,
whistles”) and voices: “Me, Virginia, Mr. Davis.”
These diary entries contain the only reference among the written sketches
and other sources relating to Different Trains of Reich’s intention to include his
own voice. As such, it should come as no surprise, since the piece originated
in the autobiographical recollections of the young Reich, accompanied by his
governess, traveling back and forth between his separated parents living in
New York City and Los Angeles, respectively.
In fact, one of the tape recordings held at the Sacher archive shows that Reich
had taken the idea to include his own voice, and hence strengthen the autobio-
graphical element. On that recording, Reich reads different phrases that could be
used as autobiographical statements, ready for sampling, such as: “We took the
train across the country,” “Back and forth. From Los Angeles to New York; from
New York to Los Angeles; from New York to Chicago,” “From 1939 to 1942.”15 He
recorded many variations of these statements by rephrasing the words but also
by varying the speed and pitch of those phrases. The various possibilities in pitch
and speed indicate that Reich was already anticipating a more flexible solution
to joining different speech melodies and suggest the possibility of recording his
own voice in an implied key (and tempo) that might fit in with the samples of
the other interviewees.16 However, none of the written sketches or computer files
indicate any further attempt by Reich to incorporate his own voice musically.
Abandoning his own voice appears to be symptomatic of Reich’s approach
to the autobiographical content of the piece. When looking at the final selec-
tion of samples used in the first movement of Different Trains, it is striking that
they tend to contain rather neutral information. Although the voice of Virginia
Mitchell provided the first material set to music, her statements in the piece re-
veal little about the particular facts surrounding Reich’s biography. In the final
version, Virginia’s comments are limited to naming different trains, destinations,
and years. Rather, it is Reich’s explanation of the piece’s context that informs the
listener about the particular personal relevance of those voices and statements
to the composer’s own experiences between 1939 and 1942—which he then
contrasts with the horrifying experiences of Jewish people in Europe at the same
time.17 Also, during the second movement’s description of the horrors of war
and the Holocaust, the selected speech fragments focus on the generally known
details of the Holocaust and reveal very little about the personal stories of the
three survivors whose voices are used in the piece.
Reich’s notes document how, in the course of working on the initial stages
of the piece, the problem shifted from a narrative one (“which voices should
I use?”) to a musical one (“how do I bring the samples together?”). The rest of the
sketches seem to suggest that the selection of samples from that point onward
was done merely on the basis of their narrative function. Although the “Kronos
Different Tracks 81

Piece Notes” occasionally mention musical properties of certain samples that

“might go together well,” most entries simply refer to issues of musical detail,
such as fixing problems, working out compositional solutions in order to turn
the (by then) final selection and sequence of samples into a score.
Reich’s sketches contain little evidence regarding how the selection of
samples was made or what his criteria might be in selecting particular phrases.
The relative absence of sketches or notes on this part of the process is somewhat
surprising since the effort of reducing hours of source recordings to a relatively
compact selection of forty-six concise sampled phrases must have been consid-
erable. For The Cave, the source recordings of the fifty-four interviewees who
were included in the final work far exceeded the amount of source material used
in Different Trains. The selection of appropriate fragments alone must have been
a difficult and—one may imagine—lengthy process. Ordering these fragments
into a narrative structure would then be the next challenge, where one might
expect to find traces of Reich “shortlisting” certain phrases, trying out different
combinations, shifting samples around to other places in the sequence for either
narrative or musical reasons.
As for The Cave, Reich’s sketchbooks do contain transcriptions of a few samples
that were abandoned during the working process and some other sketches that
show traces of moving a sample to a different place within the same scene, but
such instances are rare. Otherwise, the sketches, draft scores, and computer files
largely correspond to the final form of the piece. The impression one gains is that
once Reich had decided on the selection and sequence of the samples, he kept to
this scheme, working out the phrases from beginning to end, roughly in the same
order that they appear in the piece. If a more systematic process was involved in
selecting samples and arranging them within the dramatic/narrative structure,
then that process is not documented in the composer’s sketches. In general, he
appears to work from a nearly complete sequence of samples selected mainly
for their narrative purpose. The compositional process generally follows the de-
velopment of the piece:  starting at the beginning and gradually moving along
toward the end. This working process might seem to support the impression of
a haphazard harmonic structure “following” the demands of the pitch material
(and tempo) contained in the speech melodies of the samples—as Reich himself
implied in the remarks quoted earlier, when comparing the unchanged samples
of Different Trains and The Cave to the time-stretching approach of Three Tales.
In reality, however, there is far more harmonic continuity involved in his first two
sample-based pieces, as we shall see in the next section.

Harmonic Coherence and Fragmentation

The metaphor of a journey is commonly used in many contexts, including

the journey of life itself. In music analysis, it is often applied to tonal music,
82 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

describing modulations and tonal movement in terms of departure, destination,

arrival, or—when the latter remains out of reach—an ongoing journey. In the
interviews surrounding the first run of The Cave in 1993, Reich often hinted at
such a similar tonal journey, with each act “arriving” in A minor.18 Regardless
of the tonal structure, The Cave can be considered a journey, even toward a
particular destination: the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. The journey there
is made three times, each time with different fellow travelers:  Israeli Jews (in
act 1), Palestinian Muslims (in act 2), and Americans (in act 3), highlighting
the common connection Jews, Muslims, and Christians share with the biblical
characters of Abraham and his direct relatives.19 In terms of the work’s musical
journey, one can identify a difficult balance between harmonic coherence and
stasis on the one hand and on the other the chaotic shifts from one harmony to
the next in its montage-like structure. One can assume that a particular chal-
lenge of this work was to shape an overall large-scale structure in such a way
that the narrative sequence of individual samples and the piece’s dramaturgy
coincide with some degree of coherence on the level of harmonic structure.
The idea that Reich simply selected his speech samples based on their text
(and semantic meaning) alone seems naive, and it is safe to assume that harmonic
considerations played an important part in his compositional process: first, in
the selection of some samples based on their harmonic properties. It is conceiv-
able that some samples were simply disregarded because they did not “fit” into
the composition’s harmonic framework, although they may have seemed inter-
esting to Reich from a narrative point of view. Secondly, arranging the selected
samples into a particular order could have involved harmonic as well as narra-
tive considerations. As mentioned earlier, Reich’s sketches offer some evidence
of the former but surprisingly few examples of the latter, of “shifting around”
samples to establish the large-scale harmonic structure. (There is—as with
Different Trains—remarkably little evidence of a trial-and-error process in the
written [sketch] materials.) The impression evinced from looking at the sketch
materials is that Different Trains and The Cave consisted primarily of a patchwork
of samples held together by the text rather than any underlying harmonic shape;
but this contradicts Reich’s own assertion that—at least on a large-scale level—
harmonic regions constitute an important structural function in The Cave. The
unifying function of longer-range harmonic goals is evident only in the later
work—in Different Trains, such a harmonic unity across the three movements is
not present in any obvious way, nor is it mentioned by the composer.
A closer look at the score of The Cave does indeed reveal several intricate
ways in which the composer managed to bring about harmonic unity, in terms
of the work’s macro- and microstructures, in material that at first glance appears
strongly disjunct. First, there is the use of cyclic harmonic devices. As already
mentioned, the arrival of each act at the actual place the title refers to—the Cave
of the Patriarchs—is articulated by an A minor drone supporting images and
ambient sound from inside the mosque in acts 1 and 2. The corresponding scene
Different Tracks 83

in act 3 offers a far more diverse harmonic course, ending in C minor, but the
sketches reveal solid plans to include other large-scale harmonic devices. Table
3.1 is a rendition of the harmonic outline for act 2, as written down in one of
Reich’s sketchbooks.20 In addition to the cyclic structure, with its solid begin-
ning and ending in A minor, the attribution of key centers to each scene is ob-
vious. In the sketch, Reich has even drawn an arrow triumphantly pointing out
the correspondence between the beginning and ending, suggesting the impor-
tance he attached to this feature. Some of the selections seem to be devised in
a way that may facilitate the connection between successive scenes, such as the
transition between Sarah and Hagar or between Hagar and the sacrifice scene.
Intriguingly, there are far more than two keys involved in each of the aforemen-
tioned scenes. How such connections with key centers are meant to operate in
the sample-by-sample changes from one harmony to the next is unclear, how-
ever. The harmonies listed by Reich were probably intended to be those of the
beginning and end, respectively, of each scene. Presumably, because the final
score also clearly deviates from this outline. For instance, it shows at the end
of the first scene (Abraham) that the final sample is indeed harmonized with
the dominant of B♭ major but immediately reharmonized in D♭ major (or, more
likely, B♭ minor), none of these really constituting a harmonic preparation for
the G♭ minor, which—according to the sketch—was meant to follow.
On a smaller scale, the organization of samples in such a way that certain
harmonic regions recur, are articulated, or acquire a stabilizing function can
be found throughout the piece. One of the most interesting examples is the al-
most mirror-like symmetrical outline of the first Hagar scene in act 1,21 with a

Table  3.1 List of  harmonies attributed to  each scene of  act 2 of  The Cave,
transcribed from the composer’s sketchbook*
I. Abraham Father First Muslim
A [minor] B♭ [major]
II. Abraham Broke idols
G♭ [minor] B♭ [minor] (F [Dominant])
III. Sarah B [major] D [major] (A [Dominant])
IV. Hagar A [Dominant] (D [major]) G [minor]
V. Sacrifice Ishmael & Isaac
G [minor] B♭ [minor]
VI. Halil Cave
D [major] A [minor]
(G13 = IV) F [major]

* For the purposes of clarity, two redundant columns from the original sketch are omitted.
84 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

Example 3.1 Speech melodies in The Cave from the first Hagar scene, act 1 (1993 version).

repetition of a sample in order to establish coherence, as well as the stringing

together of several different samples that share a key of six flats (see Ex. 3.1).
A second, more traditional harmonic device is Reich’s use of key centers to
denote certain characters. A similar device is audibly present in the instrumen-
tation (the oboe and cor anglais are reserved for Isaac, the clarinet and bass
clarinet for Hagar), and indeed the composer’s sketches do make sporadic
references to the link between biblical characters and certain keys.22 In his notes,
Reich indicates certain keys associated with certain characters, using conven-
tional harmonic relations to indicate connections between the characters on a
dramaturgical level, the key word here being “relative,” indicating both relative
key centers and family ties between Abraham and his sons as being each other’s
relatives.
Apart from identifiable key centers, the particular harmonic connections
on a more local scale and the type of chords used in fact betray a quite elabo-
rate approach to tonal harmony. Instead of resorting to conventional cadential
formulas or even standard triadic or seventh-chord types, Reich shows a pref-
erence for more complex chords, mostly pentachords and hexachords drawn
from the diatonic material available in any given key. The high number of pitch
classes correlates with a higher level of dissonance—which often resolves only to
another dissonant chord. When Reich does denote harmonies in his sketches, it
is obvious that he conceives of them as tonal chords, their tonal function mostly
determined by the movement of bass notes. Nor does the composer’s way of
assigning a key to a passage rely on the presence of the tonic either, as illustrated
by the succession of dominants from the “Isaac” scene in act 1 (see Ex. 3.2,
which Reich identifies as “A major V,” “D minor V,” and “B♭ V,” respectively).23
Different Tracks 85

Example 3.2 Sample and harmonies from The Cave, act 1 (“Isaac” scene) as notated in
Reich’s sketchbook (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

On the other hand, the chords themselves are never clear triads or seventh
chords and for that reason are inherently ambiguous. As a string of dominants
not (immediately) resolving to their respective tonics, this example may seem
odd from a functional perspective. However, the voice leading and especially
the presence of common tones among the subsequent harmonies provide an
element of continuity. In this case, the fifth D-A remains a constant presence,
granting the entire progression a sense of D minor, the tonic and fifth already
present throughout the successive dominants on E and A, resolving in the final
chord when the third (F) becomes the root of the final harmony.
This type of working is present throughout Reich’s chord changes in The
Cave and Different Trains alike. It gives Reich the opportunity to “compose
out” certain harmonic regions. This technique can be divided into two recur-
rent types: either oscillating between different bass notes that support the same
chord (as was already evident in Reich’s sketch for the “Isaac” scene) or by alter-
nating chords. Thus, the first two chords in Example 3.2 oscillate between the
root V and what may be interpreted as ♭ VII, bringing in an almost blues-like G♮
as the bass note instead of the G♯, which would be the more obvious choice in a
dominant eleventh chord on E.
The latter type has a typical two-chord shape, often in combination with a
bass line in fourths or fifths, or more elaborate ways of building harmonic move-
ment between chords “working out” a single speech sample. Reich’s harmonic
designations do help us understand these chords as a sequence of dominants
dissolving into other dominants. However, these are altered chords that add to
the harmonic richness of the material while making the functional identifica-
tion of these chords as dominants less obvious, albeit still possible.
These smaller-scale intricacies are interesting enough from the vantage point
of harmonic language, but as such they operate on a more local chord-by-chord
level and do not generate long-range harmonic direction. That such direction
was a salient feature of The Cave has been mentioned previously, but also in
86 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

Example 3.3 Harmonies in Different Trains, movement 1.

Different Trains an outspoken sense of harmonic continuity can be identified.

How harmonies combine to create coherence on a larger scale may best be il-
lustrated by discussing the set of chords from the first movement of Different
Trains (see Ex. 3.3).
Comparing these harmonies24 to the ones from The Cave in Example  3.2,
it is striking that instead of working with one prominent bass note against a
cluster-like diatonic chord, Reich uses a two-part bass line in parallel fourths (or
occasionally fifths, as seen in chords 4, 10, and 12). The dyads in the lower reg-
ister may be perceived as moving semi-independently from the chord’s upper
register (also mostly set out as stacked fourths), especially when the upper
harmony remains the same and only the two lower parts are moving, as is the
case between chords 1–2 and chords 3–4, respectively (a harmonic technique
that ensures an element of continuity between successive chords on different
samples). This brings to mind the dyads that appear in the lowest register in
Music for 18 Musicians, in the pulse sections played by the two bass clarinets.
These are likewise written in fourths or fifths and similarly introduce harmonic
ambiguity by not readily aligning themselves harmonically with the higher reg-
ister chords above them.
Keith Potter has argued that functional harmony in Music for 18 Musicians
can be identified in relation to the bass dyads alone.25 In his sketchbooks, Reich
similarly writes out the first six of these harmonies (up to “Different trains every
Different Tracks 87

time”), identifying them as “F [major] II,” “D♭ [major] I64 ,” “A♭ [major] I64 or C
[minor] VI64,” “C [major] II,” “D♭ [major] I,” and “G♭ [major] I,” respectively.26 His
way of assigning functional harmony to these chords reveals that—apart from
the fourth one (which is in root position second degree)—all are considered by
the composer as chords in second inversion, mainly on the tonic. Again, The
Cave shows Reich using a wider variety of harmonic scale degrees, where the
implied key center harmonizing a sample is most often not rooted on the tonic.
In fact, it turns out to be easier to consider the harmonies in this example
from Different Trains in their entirety and not as combinations of chords
with semi-independent bass dyads, as in the case of Music for 18 Musicians.
Nonetheless, there are some notable aspects in Reich’s harmonic language here.
The first remarkable feature is the composer’s choice to repeat the first sample
(“From Chicago to New  York”), dividing the text of the first movement into
two sections: the first listing trains and destinations, the second listing the years
these events took place. More than serving the text and bringing structural sym-
metry, its harmonic function in establishing D♭ major as a strong point of refer-
ence at the beginning and center of the movement is crucial. Moreover, Reich
sets the fifth sample to the same chord, effectively connecting harmonically all
the samples listing destinations: Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. Likewise, the
chord underpinning “One of the fastest trains” is repeated for “in 1939” and in
“1941.” Two chains (as indicated in Ex. 3.3) of recurring chords, the second of
which sets different samples, effectively bring coherence and even steady points
of harmonic reference.27
When taking the roots of the chords into account (to the ear, the bass notes
do not always immediately sound like a second inversion, mostly because in the
paradiddle pattern the root arrives on the downbeat, giving it structural priority
over the fourth below, which then follows), the harmonic progression of the first
movement even takes on a far greater sense of unity than merely because of the
repetition of certain chords. Example 3.3 also makes obvious the fact that many
chords share pitch classes with their neighbor: the shared top C–F–B♭ between
the first and second chords, and similarly G–C–F between the third and fourth
chords are obvious to the eye as well as to the ear. More “internal” exchange of
pitch classes is evident elsewhere, for instance, A♭–C–F occurring (in different
octave positions) between the second and third chords, or—more elaborately—
the exchange between the two top notes and bass notes of the penultimate and
ultimate chords (C–F in the eleventh chord becomes the bass dyad for the
twelfth, and correspondingly, the E♭–A♭ bass notes of the former chord become
the top notes of the final chord). Other intervals between successive chords are
generally small, suggesting that parsimonious voice leading has been an impor-
tant feature in connecting these harmonies.
This combination of common notes and parsimonious voice leading also
explains the progressions that appear on the surface to be more remote: the aug-
mented fourth A♭–D between the third and fourth chord stands out, but it can
88 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

Example 3.4 Different Trains, movement 1 (harmonic reduction).

be read as a tritone substitution (D substituting for A♭ as dominant, common in

jazz harmony), so that the progression from the third to the fifth chord becomes
A♭ (the real dominant)–D (the substitute dominant) to D♭ (the tonic). The tri-
tone G–D♭ between the first two chords works in a similar way. This only leaves
the ninth chord (on the second “1939” sample), which is a stepwise chromatic
move from A♭–A♮ from the previous chord (with a B added), smoothly leading
into C♯/D♭, thanks to the shared pitches E, G♯, B, C♯, and F♯.
When one looks at voice leading in establishing larger-scale harmonic direc-
tion in Different Trains, this movement suddenly appears to be quite strongly
unified, as illustrated by an alternative harmonic reduction set out in Example
3.4. The example reduces the harmony to the bass dyads (as mentioned be-
fore), with the highest-sounding notes playing the paradiddle patterns (high-
low-high-high-low-high-low-low) that form the driving rhythmic force for the
piece, compared by Reich to that of a train engine. Throughout the movement,
the chord-to-chord movement at the extremities of the registral range establish
powerful voice-leading properties that are obvious to the ear. This makes it pos-
sible to consider the upper notes as forming a chromatic line descending from F
(for the first eight chords, with the C having a kind of prolongational function)
over E (in chords 9–11) to the final E♭. This not only grants a strong sense of
directionality but also confirms the division of the movement as being in two
segments (as discussed earlier on the basis of the text):  the F makes its final
appearance at the emergence of the years (“in 1939”) in the text, after which it
descends chromatically.
When rendered in this way, the continuity of movement revolving around D♭
major becomes obvious. The presence of the D♭ chords (and their enharmonic
equivalent on C♯ as the tenth chord in the sequence) is unmistakable, as is the
prominence of its dominant (A♭) and to a lesser degree its subdominant (G♭).
As this example indicates, one could consider everything as prolongations of
D♭ and A♭, with most chord changes occurring quite smoothly, which is no sur-
prise given the combination of parsimonious voice leading and common tones
involved. However, the progression does not end on D♭ major, but rather on an F
minor chord, introducing (in addition to D♭ and A♭ major) a third harmonic re-
gion. The third-based relationship between these three keys is interesting, as the
Different Tracks 89

roots of each chord together constitute a D♭ major triad, which might even lead
to the assumption that the entire movement is a composing out of this triad.
A normal assumption to make would be that the move to F minor was
designed to smooth the transition from D♭ to a more remote key at the first
chord of the second movement. The opposite is true, however. The second
movement begins again in D♭ major, so the shift toward F minor in fact serves
to introduce harmonic contrast in the transition from the first movement to the
ominous tone of the second. At the conjunction between these two movements,
samples of train sounds suddenly give way to an air-raid siren, the tempo drops
(or, more precisely, it accelerates from ♩ = 99 to ♩ = 104), but the note values
are suddenly doubled, creating the impression of the tempo almost halving in
speed). It is understandable that in order to underpin the striking effect of this
transition, Reich opted for a sense of harmonic contrast instead of seamlessly
continuing the implied D♭ tonality.
Another reason to move to F minor at the end of the first movement of
Different Trains is that it anticipates the final bars of the piece. There, in move-
ment 3, the “Girl who had a beautiful voice” starts in F major and moves toward
F minor (“more, more, and they applauded”), which hauntingly concludes the
work. Based on the evidence in Reich’s sketches, it seems improbable that he
already had a clear idea about the key center in which Different Trains would
end, when he decided to use F minor as the final harmony for the first move-
ment. But even if it was not planned in advance (as opposed to The Cave, where
A  minor was conceived as a focal point throughout the piece from the very
outset), the long-range structuring implication of this move to F minor does
grant the piece a greater sense of coherence.

Conclusion

From the foregoing discussion of Steve Reich’s use of harmony in his sample-
based works Different Trains and The Cave, one useful approach might be to
consider each work primarily on the merits of the topics it includes. These topics
are numerous and closely relate to important recent historical and intellectual
debate. If one also adds Three Tales and the more recent WTC 9/11 (2010, also
for string quartet) then the following themes are addressed: the Holocaust, the
intersections of monotheistic religions and Middle East politics, the impact
of technology on twentieth-century life and society, and the 9/11 attacks on
New  York’s World Trade Center. Praise for these works, by Richard Taruskin
(regarding Different Trains) among others, has highlighted their moral qualities,
considering them to be an adequate artistic response to such events.28
These approaches typically tend to stress the narrative content of the
pieces: the use of speech fragments; the identity of the speakers; the meaning
90 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

of the words they say; and all the biographical, political, and indeed moral is-
sues such works touch upon. This is not so different from statements given by
Reich himself about these works when discussing the choice of samples and
the narrative topics that lie at the center of these pieces. At the same time, such
comments seem to distract from the musical structures at work in them. Reich’s
remark after completing The Cave, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, about
wishing the music “take the lead again instead of following” the speech melodies,
may suggest the image of a composer devising ways of piecing together a set of
ready-made samples.
The rate of harmonic change and the suddenness of those changes is in-
deed striking (though not unprecedented) in his music from this point onward,
but a more in-depth look at both Different Trains and The Cave, as attempted
here, does reveal the way in which two types of structure are utilized. A nar-
rative structure comes first in the working process—provided by the selection
of sampled speech, which then also furnishes the musical material with the
speech melodies—as evidenced in Reich’s sketch materials. This is then followed
by a harmonic structure. The latter is not simply derived from the ready-made
sampled material, however, but rather takes on a very important structuring
function in its own right. For this purpose, Reich employs a range of harmonic
strategies and techniques, forging harmonic connections on both micro and
macro levels.
Even in Different Trains—his earliest “sampler” piece—the distribution of
extended harmonic regions is done in such a way that larger-scale harmonic
movement (and, more important, harmonic continuity) is at least to some ex-
tent established. Essentially, Reich’s statement about “following” the harmony as
implied by each speech melody may be misleading, for a composer has a rea-
sonable choice among possible chords with which to harmonize each sampled
speech melody (the harmonization of the same samples with different chords in
The Cave clearly demonstrates this). While Reich’s diary-style notes in Different
Trains testify that the composer was still struggling with how best to approach
the technique of setting samples, even there he demonstrates an immaculate
sense of shaping and organizing the material: of bringing logical coherence and
continuity to the structural level that matches these pieces’ dramatic power and
narrative scope.

Notes

1. Reich 2002b, 151.

2. Ibid., 152.
3. Ibid., 238.
4. Wlodarski 2010.
5. Sacher 2009, 6–8.
Different Tracks 91

6. At the time I consulted the Steve Reich Collection, the Paul Sacher Stiftung
was still in the middle of the process of making the computer files accessible for
consultation. Inevitable problems of out-of-date software, incompatibility with
new operating systems, and similar difficulties of accessing digital-born documents
slowed down this process, so I  was able to actually “open” only a few Different
Trains computer files. For The Cave and the later sampler pieces, there were fewer
difficulties, partly because of Reich’s choice to switch to software that in retrospect
provided fewer compatibility issues with more recent operating systems. But, in
checking the list of file names and dates against the many printed draft scores, the
impression one gets is that Reich printed out each music notation computer file for
Different Trains.
7. For example, see Schwarz 1990; Bernard 2003.
8. Potter 2000, 234–36.
9. Fink 2005b, 50–55.
10. See Potter 2000, 219–24.
11. Ibid., 187.
12. For a theoretical discussion of harmonic features in New York Counterpoint
(1985) and The Desert Music (1983), see Tymoczko 2011, 332–39.
13. In fact, different versions of the same file exist, resaved with later additions
in a different location as the composition process went along, as well as a printout of
that file.
14. These are referred to as a slightly longer phrase: “he came from Chicago to
New York.”
15. Tape recording digitized on CD-R: PSS SSR (CD 11, track 3).
16. Unfortunately, the recording is undated, so it is not possible to deduce at
what stage during the composition of the first movement Reich recorded his own
voice. He does, however, interrupt his reading every now and then to play a few
chords on the piano, which might indicate that he had some specific key centers in
mind with which he wanted his voice to match harmonically.
17. Reich 2002b, 151–52. This is also included in the introduction to the
published score of Different Trains.
18. Ibid., 174.
19. The Cave retells the biblical story of Abraham, his wife Sarah, his concubine
Hagar, and his children Isaac and Ishmael. It does so by collecting many people’s
observations about what these biblical characters signify for them. Since Abraham is
regarded as a common “ancestor” of three religions—Jews, Muslims, and Christians—
these remarks vary significantly as the interviewees project their different cultural
backgrounds, opinions, and interpretations onto these symbolical characters. The
commentaries are interspersed with selections from the Old Testament, the Koran,
and similar sources presenting “original” versions on the story.
20. PSS SSR, Sketchbook [42].
21. The 1993 version of The Cave included many scenes subsequently deleted in
the 2005 version (the latter mostly complying with the CD release of the recording).
The original work included two scenes devoted to Hagar in the first act—only the
second of these made it into the later version.
92 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

22. See also Ryan Ebright’s chapter in this volume on The Cave for more on the
relationship between characters and key centers.
23. PSS SSR, Sketchbook [41], 19 (beginning): “Who is Isaac harmonic move-
ment” (dated August 24, 1990).
24. In these reductions, octave doublings of pitch classes have mostly been
eliminated; nonetheless, the reductions preserve the relative positions of the notes
within the chord.
25. Potter 2000, 234–35.
26. PSS SSR, Sketchbook [39], 24–25. In Reich’s sketch, the first chord’s bass note
is G and not the second inversion with D as the lowest note, as in the final score.
27. The opposite technique—setting the same sample with different harmonies—
happens as well, for instance, in the “Who is Ibrahim” scene from act 2 of The Cave.
There, the sample “peace upon him” is initially harmonized with the dominant of B♭
major but then immediately reharmonized in D♭ major or (more likely) a tonic in
B♭ minor.
28. Taruskin 2008, 101–2.
4

“We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece”

The Reconciliatory Aesthetic of Steve Reich
and Beryl Korot’s The Cave

Ryan Ebright

On February 25, 1994, an American-born Jewish religious fanatic named

Baruch Goldstein massacred dozens of Muslim worshipers in the mosque that
sits above the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron—the same cave that serves as the
subject of Steve Reich and video artist Beryl Korot’s 1993 opera, The Cave. While
protests and riots sprang up across the West Bank of Israel-Palestine in the im-
mediate aftermath of this event, the New York Times invited Reich and Korot—
having recently completed an eight-month European and American tour of The
Cave—to respond publicly to the massacre. In an article published two weeks
later, the pair felt compelled to dismiss the idea that The Cave, a self-designated
“documentary music video theater work” that explores the common ancestry of
Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, could influence the Middle East peace process.
Moreover, they explicitly disavowed art’s capacity to inspire any direct political
or social change whatsoever, writing: “Pablo Picasso’s [painting] Guernica had
no effect on the aerial bombing of civilians, nor did the works of Kurt Weill,
Bertolt Brecht, and many other artists stop the rise of Hitler. These works live
because of their quality as works of art.”1
Taken at face value, this disavowal of art’s efficacy is understandable—what
artist would wish that the merit, success, or indeed failure of their work be de-
termined by its ability to prevent atrocities? Their statement, however, belies
the explicitly political genesis of The Cave, the development of which coincided
with rising Arab-Israeli tensions in the 1980s. Early sketches, outlines, and
descriptions of The Cave reveal that Korot and Reich, who are married, initially
viewed their quasi-opera as a step toward “reconciling the family of man.” By
the time of The Cave’s premiere, however, Korot and Reich instead attempted a
more detached, apolitical stance, shying away from the fundamental question
they had set out to answer: How can Jews and Muslims live together peacefully?
Organized in three acts, The Cave tells the story of the biblical patri-
arch Abraham, his wife Sarah, her handmaid Hagar, and his sons Ishmael
(from Hagar) and Isaac (from Sarah). The title derives from the Cave of the
Patriarchs (also known as the Cave of Machpelah), where Abraham and his
family are purportedly buried, and which is the only location where Jews and

93
94 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

Muslims both worship, albeit at different times. The Cave recounts their story
using texts drawn from the book of Genesis and the Koran, as well as accounts
found in the Jewish Midrash and Islamic Hadith commentaries. These texts
are presented musically—through various combinations of four singers and 13
instrumentalists—and/or visually, via five large video screens. Reich and Korot
interweave these Abrahamic narratives with collaged sections of audiovisual
fragments drawn from interviews with Israeli Jews (act 1), Palestinian Muslims
(act 2), and Americans (act 3), who comment subjectively on Abraham and
his family. Going a step beyond Reich’s much-lauded Different Trains, which
utilized a similar sampling technique, these interview excerpts form both the
musical and the visual basis for the entire work. Reich subjects the interviewees’
speech melodies to processes of fragmentation and imitation, using instruments
to double or harmonize the melodies, while footage of the interviewees is
projected onto alternating screens. In turn, the harmonies derived from these
speech samples inform the harmonic progressions of the movements that
convey the Abrahamic narrative. Korot, meanwhile, abstracts visual details from
the interview footage onto various screens to create a sort of mise-en-scène for
each interviewee.
The long development of The Cave from 1980 to 1993 provides a window
into Reich’s evolving approach to political art and how he and Korot reconcile
their political and artistic motivations. Like its aesthetic predecessor, Different
Trains, The Cave relies extensively on the rhetoric of witness to establish an aura
of objectivity.2 By working within the sphere of recorded documentary material,
removing the more politically volatile ideas, and refraining from suggesting a
solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Reich and Korot preemptively attempted to
circumvent any charges of political propagandizing. Even in its final form, how-
ever, vestiges of their underlying bid for reconciliation still remain in The Cave’s
music, text, and narrative structure.
Korot and Reich’s statement in the Times conforms to the latter’s professed
attitude toward art and politics—what Sumanth Gopinath has termed Reich’s
“theory of political impotence.”3 It echoes remarks that the composer made
as early as July 1969 in the avant-garde music periodical Source. In the article
“Events/Comments:  Is New Music Being Used for Political or Social Ends?,”
which surveyed several contemporary composers, Reich affirmed that although
he had never written music for political or social ends, “Certainly any kind of
work of art that gets out into the public will be interpreted politically, if there
is any possibility of doing it. I think that the politics are more successful when
the music comes first.”4 Although not denying the possibility of politically en-
gaged music, Reich posits a clear divorce between a work’s musical content—a
product of its creator—and its potential political messages, which more often
derive from audience perceptions than from an artist’s intentions. Central to
Reich’s formulation of music’s political (non)utility is his insistence that artistic
or formal ideas for his compositions should precede any ideas of content. In
“We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece” 95

his numerous press interviews during the lengthy development of The Cave,
Reich took pains to express that despite the contemporary, political nature of
the opera’s subject, the aesthetic impetus—combining documentary video and
music in a theatrical context—always came first.5
The documentary trail of The Cave’s creation suggests a more complex nar-
rative than Reich has provided in his public statements. The origin of The Cave
dates to June 17, 1980, when Reich lay in a hospital recovering from surgery
(see Table 4.1 for a timeline of The Cave’s development). During his convales-
cence, Reich spoke with British music critic and minimalist composer Michael
Nyman about “this idea for a big theater piece. It seemed very exciting, but very
vague.”6 Shortly thereafter, Reich wrote to Betty Freeman, a longtime supporter
of his work:
I also have in mind to start a H*U*G*E project that will involve live music on
stage plus multiple image film. By that I mean dividing a wide screen movie
image into as much as 8 separate divisions all in rhythmic relation. I want to
use the voices, images and sounds of the World War II period. It will go back
to the kind of work I was doing with tape in the 60s (like Come Out) and will
be my answer to what music theatre can be.7
While implicitly situating Reich’s project in relation to the burgeoning oper-
atic career of his erstwhile colleague Philip Glass, whose Einstein on the Beach
quickly became mythologized as having effected a paradigm shift in music
theater following its American premiere in 1976, this early description of the
project reveals several important facets of Reich’s long-term theatrical pursuit.
Most significantly, Korot’s influence is immediately apparent. The division of
a widescreen image into multiple partitions in rhythmic relation draws di-
rectly on Korot’s pioneering video art installations Dachau 1974 and Text and
Commentary. The former utilized four screens to rhythmically interweave video
footage of the museum that now occupies what was once a Nazi German con-
centration camp.8 The proposed subject also connects to Dachau 1974, and
Reich’s letter to Freeman complicates his later assertion that the artistic idea for
a theater piece—combining documentary video with music—always preceded
the subject matter. From its conception, Reich’s bold artistic vision was matched
by an equally ambitious—or, at least, a politically loaded—subject.
Using documentary material, the composer later noted, allows Reich to deal
with otherwise impossible subject matter. This documentary commitment is
what ultimately connects much of his and Korot’s work:
I respond to what I, on a gut level, believe is the truth. And I believe in the
literal truth. If you want to talk about 9/11, I want to hear the voices of the
traffic controllers, and the firemen who gave their lives, and the people who
were living in that area and were affected by it directly. Not by somebody who’s
thinking about it or writing an essay about it. In other words, to me, it’s impos-
sible to deal with the Holocaust. But, you can have people who survived the
Table 4.1 Timeline of The Cave’s creation and related political events
Date Event

June 1980 Reich first records the idea for a documentary music video
theater work
1982–83 The Desert Music uses World War II theme originally
intended for theater work
Fall 1984 Jesse Jackson supports the formation of a Palestinian state
during his first presidential run
1986 Reich develops idea for exploring the familial roots of Jews
and Muslims (“Abraham & Nimrod” computer document)
1987 Periodic meetings and conversations with director Peter
Sellars (through January 1988); commission from Betty
Freeman for a Kronos Quartet piece (which becomes
Different Trains)
May 1987 Reich acquires Casio FZ-1 digital sampling keyboard, which
becomes a crucial technological element in Different Trains
and The Cave
December 1987 First Intifada begins in Israel-Palestine; Reich and Korot view
documentary material of Holocaust and World War II; Reich
decides to use the Freeman commission as a test run for his
theater piece; Reich listens to and conducts interviews for
Different Trains
March 1988 Reich explores possible ensemble combinations and video
equipment
April–May 1988 Renée Levine [Packer] signs on as producer
Fall 1988 Reich secures commission from Klaus-Peter Kehr of Stuttgart
Opera
November 1988 Reich and Korot decide on subject matter for The Cave and
begin searching for collaborators
Winter–Spring Early drafts of The Cave’s synopsis
1989
May–June 1989 Reich and Korot make two trips to Israel-Palestine to conduct
interviews
Early 1990 Korot and Reich decide to focus act 3 on interviews with US
Americans
April 1991 Act 1 is completed
June 1991 Reich and Korot return to Israel-Palestine for further
interviews
Fall 1991–Winter Act 2 is completed
1992
March 1992 Interviews in New York
April 1992 Interviews in Austin, Texas
February 1993 The Cave is completed
May 1993 Premiere of The Cave at the Wiener Festwochen
“We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece” 97

Holocaust talking about their lives. That’s real. In other words, I’m opposed to
acting. I don’t want to see a movie about the Holocaust. But I’ll see lots and lots
of documentaries about it. . . [Beryl and I] share that interest, that fascination
with dealing with documentary material, which is very often loaded.9
Reich made little headway on his project until the late 1980s, in part because
the technology he needed to realize his vision did not yet exist. Prior to that time
he was still considering World War II in general—and the atomic bomb in par-
ticular, according to director Peter Sellars—as a possible subject for his music
theater piece, even though his interest in those subjects had already resulted
in a large-scale choral composition, The Desert Music (1983), and would later
resurface in his second video opera, Three Tales (2002).10 Rising Arab-Israeli
tensions in the 1980s, however, increasingly attracted Reich’s attention, and the
start of the First Intifada in 1987 likely cemented his interest in the Middle East
conflict as a subject matter befitting his self-described “revolutionary” music
theater work.

From the Middle East to America: The Political Evolution

of The Cave

When an Israeli military vehicle collided with Palestinian cars in the Gaza Strip
on December 8, 1987, it triggered a wave of Palestinian protests that eventually
transformed into a sustained, six-year struggle that thrust the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict into the international spotlight once again. Against the global backdrop
of this First Intifada, Reich and Korot conceived The Cave. The official narrative
of The Cave’s birth—that its subject matter was first decided at Ellen’s coffee shop
in November 1988—underplays the extent to which The Cave can be mapped
against the geopolitical terrain of Israel and the United States in the 1980s. Reich
had been casting about for a theatrical subject since the early 1980s, and the
decisive steps he began to take toward the project in 1988 indicate that he had
found one. In April of the same year, Reich met with Renée Levine [Packer],
who would go on to produce The Cave; in the fall, he secured a commission
from Klaus-Peter Kehr of the Stuttgart Opera.11
Reich’s interest in exploring the Middle East conflict, however, stretched
back to at least the mid-1980s. In a Macintosh computer file titled “Abraham &
Nimrod,” Reich had jotted down ideas of possible historical lineages that could
illustrate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (see Table 4.2).12 This document points
to two key aspects of Reich’s perspective on the Arab-Israeli situation. First, the
composer viewed the conflict—and perhaps its resolution—as rooted in reli-
gion; and secondly, he saw its effects being played out in the United States. In one
untitled column, Reich placed Abraham and Maimonides, an eleventh-century
Sephardic Jewish philosopher and Torah scholar who lived in Spain and Africa
98 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

Table 4.2 Fragment from “Abraham & Nimrod” (Steve Reich Collection, PSS)

Untitled Column Untitled Column
Abraham Nimrod
Maimonides???? Wagner - (Words of “Der Judentum in der Musik” sung to
melody of Walkyrie, or other)
Jesse Jackson/Farakan [sic]

under Muslim rule. In another column, Reich listed Nimrod, who—according

to Jewish and Islamic tradition—was a sort of polytheistic foil to the monotheist
Abraham. Under Nimrod, Reich also listed Wagner (a well-known anti-Semite),
the outspoken American politician Jesse Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan, the
leader of the Nation of Islam. Although the left-hand column lacks a figure to
balance Jackson and Farrakhan, farther down in the document Reich noted the
possibility of using American jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, writing, “Black
contrast to Jackson—not King or Malcolm. Coltrane? Need to find interview of
his to see what’s to be quoted.”13
The juxtaposition of Farrakhan and Jackson with Coltrane in Reich’s notes
points to the composer’s awareness of the spillover effect of the Middle East
turmoil in America. As intermittent violent clashes erupted in Israel and the
Occupied Territories in the 1970s and 1980s, national discourse in the United
States concerning Israel became inflamed, particularly in exchanges be-
tween African American and Jewish communities.14 Increasingly, some black
communities began to view the Palestinian conflict as an anticolonialist Third
World struggle by a darker, oppressed majority against a whiter, subjugating mi-
nority. The Six Day War in the spring of 1967 led to an anti-Israel statement by the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (a leading Civil Rights Movement
organization), and the 1977 election of the conservative Likud party in Israel—
criticized by opponents as an inhumane regime—raised tensions between the
two communities. Inflammatory, anti-Semitic rhetoric from black nationalists
such as Farrakhan and Leonard Jeffries in the early 1980s marked a further dis-
integration of black-Jewish relations. During Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential
run, Farrakhan’s remarks in particular exacerbated the former’s already strained
relationship with the Jewish community as a result of the “Hymietown” contro-
versy.15 And at the Democratic National Convention in 1988, during Jackson’s
second run for presidency, his was the only campaign to endorse a resolution
calling for Palestinian self-determination. Even in Reich’s earliest exploration of
the Jewish-Muslim conflict, then, he framed it through an American lens.
Reich’s growing interest in the Arab-Israeli conflict conforms to a larger
trend in the 1980s of increasing Jewish American interest in the state of Israel.
Whereas the vast majority of American Jews in the 1950s and 1960s did not
consider support for Israel to be an essential part of their Jewish identity, after
“We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece” 99

the Six Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, American
Jews’ relationship with Israel changed dramatically.16 Concerns over Israel’s vul-
nerability in the Middle East after its narrow 1973 victory, coupled with fading
international support for the Jewish state, led to concerted efforts among many
American Jewish leaders to mobilize support within the United States. At the
same time, US politicians and government officials looking to revive flagging
beliefs in America’s moral superiority and exceptionalism latched onto the
Holocaust—and, consequently, America’s role as liberator—as an element of na-
tional identity.17 Although Reich’s first attention to Israel stemmed largely from
a turn toward his Jewish roots in 1975 and a scholarly interest in the history
and technique of Hebrew cantillation, through his visits to Jerusalem in the
late 1970s he would have experienced firsthand aspects of Palestinian-Israeli
tensions.18 Moreover, through his affiliation with the Lincoln Square Synagogue
he likely would have been sensitive to religious Zionists’ continued role in the
development of the state of Israel; the Modern Orthodox synagogue’s founding
rabbi, Shlomo Riskin, left his position in 1983 to become the chief rabbi of the
new West Bank settlement of Efrat.19
Despite the conflict’s contemporary resonance in the United States, Reich
emphasized the importance of engaging with the Torah, Koran, New Testament,
and Midrash, which he felt would allow him to “get [a] perspective on [the]
roots of [the] problem in [the] Middle East.”20 In the same computer document,
he reminded himself to “Go back to [the] original Midrash” and “Let ‘continuity’
come from there.” This focus on the religious roots of the conflict continued
throughout the development of The Cave, giving Reich and Korot an oppor-
tunity to express their own views of the Jewish-Muslim conflict and, more im-
portant, its resolution. In framing the present-day clashes as the manifestation
of what was once the familial conflict of a “broken” family, they shift the focus
to what ultimately connects the two sides. “The bottom line,” Reich noted in
2016, “is that, yes, there’s a religious war going on in the Middle East, of which
the chapter in Israel is played out by the Israelis and the Palestinians, but these
characters [Abraham and his family] are very much progenitors. And over here
[in the United States], people who don’t really understand that don’t really un-
derstand what’s going on in the Middle East.”21
Reich’s evolving descriptions of The Cave following his November 1988
meeting with Korot provide further windows into his goal of creating a revolu-
tionary music theater work, as well as his shifting sense of what was politically
viable in theater.22 Reich tied his exploration of Abraham to the modern history
of the state of Israel in an undated outline of the work that is likely one of the
earliest, based on its content. In it, he envisioned computer word screens that
would convey sacred texts such as the Torah, Koran, and New Testament, and
contemporary secular sources such as newspaper and magazine clippings. In
addition, audio- and videotape would be used to provide a fuller account of
Israel’s founding, Arab opposition to it, and—notably—German concentration
100 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

camps. This outline, even more than other sketches and descriptions, reveals the
strong thematic tie between The Cave and Different Trains, which Reich initially
viewed as a trial run for his first music theater work. The juxtaposition of the
Arab-Israeli conflict and the Holocaust suggests that Reich either viewed the
latter as a key historical event in the creation of Israel or, more pessimistically, as
a cautionary tale of what could happen if Arab opposition to Israel became over-
whelming. In addition, by focusing on Israel from the moment of its modern-
day founding in 1948, Reich sidesteps direct engagement with the Zionism that
informed the persistent small-scale Jewish immigration to then-Palestine in the
first half of the twentieth century and growing Arab opposition to it.
Despite the seeming emphasis on conflict found in this early outline, one
of the first prose descriptions of The Cave, created in early 1989, suggests that
Reich and Korot were explicitly invested in creating a work that would help to
negotiate and reconcile Jewish-Muslim tensions. The pair subtitled their prose
introduction to The Cave “Reconciling the Family of Man.”23 In a slightly dif-
ferent project description sent to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (an eventual
co-commissioner), Reich and Korot wrote, “The present strife surrounding the
cave and the conflicting views of Abraham / Isaac on the one hand and Ibrahim /
Ishmael on the other leads us to search for a time and place when Jews and
Muslims lived in relative harmony,” such as Cordoba, Spain, in the tenth and
eleventh centuries, or large Western cities such as New York, London, and Paris
in the present day.24 After exploring these historical sites of peaceful coexistence
in act 2 of The Cave, in act 3 the team had planned to ask the Jewish and Muslim
interviewees from act 1 “if there is a way for Jews and Muslims to live in close
proximity without physical strife.”25
Along with documenting historically peaceful interactions between Muslims
and Jews, Reich planned to explore the concept of dhimmi, a political status
whereby non-Muslims living under Muslim rule are afforded certain rights and
protections, such as independent, non-sharia courts.26 Using interviews with
Palestinian Arabs and with Jews who lived in Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, and other
Islamic countries prior to emigrating to Israel after its creation, Korot and Reich
intended to examine one obvious precedent for largely peaceful—if not per-
fectly equitable—coexistence. Although the idea of exploring dhimmi status
does not offer any firm insight into Reich’s political leanings, it is notable insofar
as the historical Muslim-Jew power imbalance reified by the dhimmi concept
inverts the asymmetric political relationship between Israelis and Palestinians
in the 1980s. In the work’s final form, however, Reich and Korot left out this po-
tentially provocative idea.
The development of the third act reveals the greatest political transformation
in The Cave between its conception and its premiere. In early descriptions of
The Cave, the final act was to focus on the present-day situation, asking whether
or not a resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict was contained in the history and
texts (the Torah and Koran) presented in the first two acts. In these descriptions,
“We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece” 101

the repeated emphasis on the familial ties between both Jews and Muslims
suggests that Reich and Korot, at least, believed that such a resolution was pos-
sible. Yet as they began the process of interviewing, transcribing, editing, and
composing, the third act shifted away from directly addressing the question
of Jewish-Muslim coexistence. Instead, by early 1990 the team had decided to
turn their attention in act 3 to the United States and Europe, to metaphorically
“turn the cameras back on the audience” with interviews that provided a “cross-
section of Western opinion.”27
Tellingly, however, Reich and Korot refrained from exploring the
hypercharged political manifestations of black-Jewish tensions in the United
States that Reich had outlined in the mid-1980s. Instead, in its final iteration,
the third act consists solely of wide-ranging American responses—sometimes
uninformed, sometimes humorous—to the questions posed to Israelis and
Palestinians in the previous acts. According to Korot, this American perspective
was fundamental to The Cave:

[Act 3 focused on America] because we’re Americans, because that’s where

we’re from and that’s the culture we know best. We don’t know the culture in
the Middle East like we know the culture here. We say we are a Judeo-Christian
culture, but how many people know the roots of our story that lies in the
Middle East, in that particular place? In 1993, the role of religion in culture
was even further removed from common dialogue than it is now.
I can’t even remember that we didn’t know somehow we were going to come
back here and do that. We weren’t sure how or what or where we were going to
do it, who we were going to ask, but . . . it was just unsatisfying as we developed
the work that it [did] not [return to America]. We were greatly relieved when
it did come back here, and that also added the fresh take that only America can
offer. . . . For us, the third act opened up a door to how complex the sources are
and where they go in time and how they travel and change.28

Given that the work was ultimately designed for American and European
audiences and conceived within the context of American culture, the third act’s
turn to the United States maintains a certain consistency. In Korot’s recollection,
the piece seems to have stemmed from a need to examine how Americans un-
derstood and reacted to the Arab-Israeli conflict and how attitudes in the United
States differed from perspectives in the Middle East.
Although the reasons behind the gradual political evolution of the piece re-
main tantalizingly unknown, concerns over issues of Islamic—and perhaps even
Jewish—reception likely played some role. On more than one occasion Reich
noted his fear of suffering a fate similar to that of British author Salman Rushdie,
whose 1988 novel The Satanic Verses prompted Muslim protests, death threats,
and, for the writer, several years of hiding. When composing the opening music
of The Cave in April 1989 and considering the implications that orchestration
might have for characters, Reich admonished himself in his notes, “Remember
102 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

Rushdie!”29 Intriguingly, Reich’s worry was a potentially negative reaction not

to his musical portrayal of Abraham, Hagar, or Ishmael but to that of Sarah,
whose advanced age and infertility he had considered illustrating via the use
of a guiro. By 1990, Reich publicly disavowed any political motivation what-
soever, claiming, “We are not trying to make a political piece, we don’t want to
make enemies like Salman Rushdie did, and political pieces get dated.”30 While
Reich characterized the project’s politics—or purported lack thereof—with this
oblique reference to Muslim fundamentalism, he and Korot also went to great
lengths to ensure The Cave was sensitive to Islamic and Jewish perspectives,
screening the work for Jewish and Muslim religious leaders and scholars in ad-
vance of the premiere.

“Reconciling the Family of Man”: The Cave as Arab-Israeli

Conflict Resolution

Despite Korot and Reich’s best efforts, politics remain an animating force in
The Cave, occasionally visible beneath the documentary veil of objectivity they
attempted to cast over the opera. The pair’s impetus to reconcile Abraham’s
descendants can be detected in the music, the text, and—most immediately—
the narrative structure of The Cave. Indeed, the competing narratives that drive
the larger Jewish-Muslim conflict are reflected in the juxtaposition of audio-
visual interview fragments. As Carey Perloff, director of the initial production
of The Cave, reflected in 2013:
[As a director] I am drawn to the collision of ideas and the ways in which live
theater can foreground conflict—so The Cave, with its competing narratives
about belief, about history, about ideas of morality and justice and religion—fit
my thinking beautifully. . . .
To me The Cave was about the slippery slope of narrative. About how the
stories which a culture tells itself become handed down in sometimes dangerous
and ossified ways. . . . Because the piece is built on contradictory narratives and
a multiplicity of voices, it shows the myth of Babel in real time: the way that
human beings are often divided by their language, and trapped in their own
myopic narratives.31
On a structural level, the very act of setting competing narratives side
by side can be, in itself, political, and the handling of narratives in The Cave
mirrors two distinct approaches to resolving Israeli-Palestinian tensions.
Negotiators involved in conflict resolution and reconciliation, particularly in
the Middle East, prefer emphasizing coexisting narratives that are recognized
and legitimized by both parties in a conflict.32 Insofar as it presents contem-
porary Israeli, Palestinian, and American narratives in turn, The Cave models
this method. A second, longer-term approach to conflict resolution calls for the
“We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece” 103

construction of a single, bridging narrative that encompasses both sides.33 By

weaving long-established biblical and Koranic accounts of Abraham and his
family—the central narrative of The Cave—through competing narratives of
Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans, Reich and Korot highlight a fundamental,
foundational myth that might serve as such a bridging narrative.
In a 2013 interview, Korot implied that at the time of The Cave’s creation,
she and Reich saw the common roots of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity as a
potentially positive, unifying force. Pointing to the international community’s
increased, often negative, awareness of Islam’s religious roots since the 1990s
owing to the rise of radicalism, Korot noted, “We, slightly before that, saw a
different message [about Islam] that later came to be more dominant.”34 Even
Reich in a 1993 interview confessed that he saw a peaceful message in The
Cave: “The traditional Jewish view is that Ishmael’s and Isaac’s presence at their
father’s burial was a sign of their reconciliation. And if they could do it, perhaps
it suggests Arabs and Israelis can, too.”35
Reich and Korot are careful in The Cave not to dictate how this peace might be
achieved; for them, doing so would push the piece from the realm of art into the
realm of propaganda. Nevertheless, the central idea of the work’s conclusion—
in Korot’s words, “that the simple act of breaking bread with the Other is also
the most difficult in so many ways”—is fundamentally about reconciliation.36
Similarly, for assistant director Nick Mangano (who would later direct Three
Tales), one of the most powerful themes in The Cave was that “a common re-
ligion, a common faith, but then also for some just a common mythology, can
actually bring us together rather than further divide us.”37
More specific traces of Korot and Reich’s underlying motivation still exist.
In one of the last changes to act 1 before the work’s premiere, Reich amended
the final line of the opera’s opening text from Genesis 16. Since composing the
movement in 1989, Reich had foregrounded the familial conflict that lies at the
heart of the work by ending the movement with only the first portion of verse
12: “And he [Ishmael] will be a man of the wild; his hand against all, and the
hand of all against him.” In a late change, however, Reich included the final
portion of that verse: “And in the presence of all his brothers shall he dwell.”38
This inclusion suggests a familial cohabitation, perhaps even a peaceful one, that
answers in the affirmative the question that Reich initially asked: Can Jews and
Muslims live together peacefully? Reich’s translation, likely his own, lends this
interpretation even more significance. Whereas most biblical translations in-
terpret the final line as a strife-laden coexistence—“he will live in hostility to-
ward all his brothers” or “he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen”—Reich’s
rendering, with its seeming emphasis on equality and brotherhood, downplays
conflict.
Reich’s harmonic structures in The Cave also point toward a conscious effort
to reconcile the Jewish and Muslim sides of the Abrahamic family through an
intriguing mixing of keys. Reich associated specific keys with each character,
104 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

Example 4.1 Transcription of entry dated July 22, 1990, in Sketchbook [41] (Steve Reich
Collection, PSS).

using harmonies derived from interviewee speech melodies as a basis for the
narrative text sections. For example, in a sketchbook entry dated July 18, 1990,
Reich wrote out each harmony from the act 1 movements he had constructed
from interviewee responses to the questions “Who, for you, is Abraham?” and
“Who, for you, is Sarah?” In an entry four days later (see Ex. 4.1), Reich then
chose several of these chords to serve as the harmonic foundation for the “Birth
of Isaac” text (Genesis 18:1–2, 9–14; 21:1–3). Along with these harmonies, Reich
listed the primary keys for each family member (having already transcribed,
harmonized, and ordered the speech samples for Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, and
Ishmael). Abraham, as father of both Muslims and Jews, occupies two distinct
key areas: F major and A minor. As if to emphasize the musical logic between
Abraham and Isaac, Reich wrote out the harmonic connection:  “Isaac  =  D
mi[nor] relative of F maj[or] Abraham.”
Reich’s decision to create a musical connection between Abraham and Isaac,
despite having not yet transcribed and harmonized the speech samples for the
“Who is Isaac?” section, demonstrates his intention to emphasize the common-
ality of these characters, even when doing so challenged his commitment to
the primacy of the documentary source material. It also highlights Reich’s un-
expected mixing of familial keys. Given both Abraham’s and Sarah’s harmonic
associations (F major/A minor and C major/A minor, respectively), the in-
tuitive key choice for Isaac would be A  minor. However, rather than keeping
Isaac within the white-key diatonic family and linking Hagar (F major) and
Ishmael together in the “darker” flat-key space of F major/D minor, Reich
assigns A minor to Ishmael and D minor to Isaac, thereby mixing the musical
bloodlines and ensuring that the Ishmaelite family would not be read as darker
or more negative.39
Act 3’s focus on the United States—a stand-in for the larger West—also
can be interpreted politically. According to Korot and Reich, the “American”
third act functions, in part, as a critique of Western ignorance of foundational
“We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece” 105

cultural myths; avant-garde theater director Elizabeth LeCompte of the Wooster

Group, in a humorous reply to the first of the five interview questions (“Who,
for you, is Abraham?”), begins the act by asking, “Abraham Lincoln?”40 Yet the
American perspective accrues significance beyond what Korot and Reich ex-
pressly intended, given that The Cave played solely to Western audiences and
arguably helped raise the international profile of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
By dramatizing the gap between Middle East tensions and their interpretations
in the United States, The Cave might be read as an exhortation to Americans to
better understand their country’s increasing involvement in the Middle East.41
The act 3 responses have the added effect of explicitly inserting the United
States into the narrative of a long-standing ideological conflict. The structural
arrangement of The Cave—the Israeli perspective at the beginning, Palestinian
in the middle, and American at the end—implicitly situates the United States as
a sort of teleological endpoint to the conflict. This arrangement also mirrors the
narrative progression of Different Trains. In that piece, the first two movements
present disparate geographic settings (the United States and Europe) during sim-
ilar times before the narrative returns to America in the third movement, which
has the effect of reorienting the traumatic memories of Holocaust survivors as
part of the United States’ collective past. This straightforward narrative logic—
with the US as endpoint—suggests that the future of (and perhaps the solution
to) the conflict in the Middle East might be a kind of Western, American plu-
ralism that can accommodate multiple, contrasting narratives. Or, in another
possible reading of the third act, the path toward Palestinian-Israeli reconcilia-
tion must inevitably lead through the United States.
Like Reich’s purported musical objectivity in Different Trains, his and Korot’s
apolitical claims about The Cave weaken when confronted with the documen-
tary evidence of its development. Moreover, the very act of creating a work for
the theater suggests some sort of political stance, insofar as theater functions,
according to historian Baz Kershaw, as “a public arena for the collective explo-
ration of ideological meaning,” in which “the spectator is engaged fundamen-
tally in the active construction of meaning as a performance event proceeds.”42
Measuring the political or social impact of theater or music may prove diffi-
cult, but it does not necessarily follow that performance has no tangible effect
whatsoever. Indeed, Reich’s association with the San Francisco Mime Troupe
in the early 1960s gave him ample models for mixing theater and politics (as
well as live music and film), and his and Korot’s formal conversations with
audiences after performances of The Cave suggest a tacit acknowledgment on
their part of theater’s potential efficacy.43 If The Cave helped to raise the profile
of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it likely did so among the types of musicians,
artists, and intellectuals who might engage with Israel-Palestine in the future
as artistic creators or as scholar-critics. At the same time, The Cave offered a
model for how artists might sidestep controversy while broaching politically
sensitive subjects; the vitriolic reception of The Death of Klinghoffer, John
106 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

Adams’s 1991 opera dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict, provides a prime
counterexample.44
Although the use of documentary material gives The Cave a patina of im-
partiality and objectivity, it also supports a political reading of the opera. Amy
Lynn Wlodarski has argued convincingly that Reich’s seemingly unbiased use of
documentary material in Different Trains acts as a form of “secondary witness,”
in which Reich’s interpretations of Holocaust survivor testimonies are advanced
without revealing his own subjective standpoint.45 Such subjectivities also un-
derlie documentary theater, where works constructed by juxtaposing documents
have a long history of being designed for expressly political purposes. Drama
theorist Carol Martin writes in her expansive assessment of documentary the-
ater in the late twentieth century that “as staged politics, specific instances of
documentary theatre construct the past in service of a future the authors would
like to create.”46 As staged politics, The Cave allowed Korot and Reich to con-
struct both the past and the present in the service of an eventual reconciliation
among all of Abraham’s descendants.

Notes

1. Reich and Korot 1994.

2. Documentary theater historian Derek Paget (2009, 235–36) notes that much
late twentieth-century documentary theater is built on the belief that a “witness’s
claim to authenticity can still warrant a credible perspective” in a mediatized, “post-
documentary” culture.
3. Gopinath 2005, 41.
4. L.  Austin 1969, 91. The article also included a response from Lukas Foss
that prefigured Reich’s statement about Guernica. Gopinath has pointed out that
the trope of Guernica and its inability to effect political change appeared first in
Jean-Paul Sartre’s What Is Literature? (1949) and later in Theodor Adorno’s article
“Commitment” (1965).
5. See, for example, “Jonathan Cott Interviews Beryl Korot and Steve Reich
(1993),” in Reich 2002b, 72. Reich continued to espouse his “theory of political im-
potence” during the creation of The Cave (see Schwarz 1989).
6. Cowan n.d.
7. Letter to Betty Freeman from Steve Reich, August 14, 1980, Betty Freeman
Papers, Special Collections and Archives, UC San Diego (used by permission).
Freeman (1921–2009) was one of the most important American patrons of new
music and the arts in the middle to late twentieth century. See J. Johnson 2014.
8. Reich’s interest in video extends back to 1975, the year after he met Korot.
See “Videotape and a Composer (1975),” in Reich 2002b, 82–84. On Korot’s Dachau
1974, see Korot 1976, 76–77; Godfrey 2007, 140–67.
9. Steve Reich, phone interview with the author, July 25, 2016.
“We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece” 107

10. This recollection from Sellars was made in a conversation with the author
on March 30, 2013, in Princeton, New Jersey. Reich and Sellars remained in inter-
mittent contact through most of 1987 regarding a potential theatrical collaboration.
An early press description confirms that Reich was still thinking of using World
War II as a subject: “His theatre piece will have its premiere at the Stuttgart Opera
House in September 1991 and will bring video into play on a grand scale. . . . The
subject matter is not yet decided, but it seems likely to be a collage of the type used
in Different Trains, and it will follow Desert Music (a setting of poems by William
Carlos Williams about the atom bomb) in dealing with the Second World War”
(Bowen 1988).
11. When Kehr later took a position with the Wiener Festwochen, the commis-
sion followed. On the commissioning and producing of The Cave as an entrepre-
neurial enterprise, see Ebright 2017.
12. “Abraham & Nimrod,” computer document, Steve Reich Collection, Paul
Sacher Stiftung (hereafter PSS). (All PSS sources appearing in this chapter are used
by permission.) This particular document is illustrative of the difficulties posed by
working with electronic archival documents. Some portions of this text file do not
render properly on the computers at the Sacher Stiftung; they appear as an illegible
jumble of numbers, letters, and punctuation symbols. Nevertheless, several portions
of the text file are readable. In that sense, these documents are not unlike manuscript
fragments in which only a small portion is legible. The dating of these electronic files
is also fraught with difficulty. Although the Macintosh operating system lists the
date of the file’s creation as October 2, 1986, one of the notes within the document is
dated “9/24/86.”
13. Steve Reich Collection, PSS.
14. C. West 1994, 147–49; see also Carson 1994.
15. For a summary of the “Hymietown” incident, see Greenberg 2006, 243–44.
16. Novick 1999, 146–69.
17. Ibid., 155. Invoking the Holocaust became a central strategy in pursuit of
this support. See also Finkelstein 2003, 31, 149. Within the context of the 1970s and
atrocities committed and endured during the Vietnam War, the representation of
the United States as the antithesis of Nazi Germany helped to reinforce perceptions
of American goodness (see MacDonald 2008, 1106).
18. There are relatively few specifics about Reich’s trips to Israel. For a gen-
eral account of these trips and their effect on Reich’s compositions, see “Hebrew
Cantillation as an Influence on Composition (1982),” in Reich 2002b, 105–18; Puca
1997. In the 1980s, the Arab-Israeli conflict garnered increasing international atten-
tion owing to intermittent violence. Although there were no large-scale conflicts for
several years after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, occasional Palestinian ter-
rorist attacks and subsequent Israeli military retaliations—fueled in part by Israel’s
policy of residency revocation and continued settlement growth in the West Bank
and East Jerusalem—precluded serious efforts at peace. For a historical overview of
the Arab-Israeli conflict from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, see C. D. Smith 2013,
346–437; Harms 2012, 117–67.
108 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

19. Riskin, as well as other rabbis at Lincoln Square Synagogue, served as a

Jewish adviser to Korot and Reich during The Cave’s development. Although Reich
has never given a public indication of his relationship with Zionism or potential
solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Riskin, at least, has implied that the two-
state solution is not a viable option (see Maltz 2014). It is worth pointing out, how-
ever, that Jewish attitudes in the early 1990s toward potential peace solutions may
well have shifted due to the rise in Islamic extremism since that time.
20. Most scholars of the Arab-Israeli conflict reject the idea that the contem-
porary strife has any ancient, religious roots, arguing instead that it is a distinctly
modern, politically born conflict (see, for instance, C.  D. Smith 2013, 1; Harms
2012, 1, 3).
21. Steve Reich, phone interview with the author, July 25, 2016.
22. Numerous computer documents at the Sacher Stiftung show Reich
experimenting, in prose, with how to structure The Cave and answer its central
questions.
23. “Cave,” computer document, Steve Reich Collection, PSS. The only portions
of the text that were legible on the Sacher Stiftung computers were the headings for
each section.
24. Hamm archives, Brooklyn Academy of Music. Based on similar drafts of the
project descriptions at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, the description housed at the BAM
archives likely dates from February or March 1989.
25. Ibid.
26. The idea for exploring dhimmi status is referenced in several computer
files, including “Historical Outline Revised,” “Historical Outline Revised 2_19,”
“Questions for Jewish Scholars_x,” and “The Cave-Outline 1_20_89” (Steve Reich
Collection, PSS).
27. “The Cave-Book Description,” computer document, Steve Reich Collection,
PSS. In this document from July 1990, Reich wrote, “We will interview prima-
rily Americans (including Black, Asian and Hispanic interviewees) and also some
Europeans, and will aim for a cross section of Western opinion primarily (but cer-
tainly not exclusively) reflecting what is presently viewed as a ‘sophisticated and
enlightened’ outlook.”
28. Beryl Korot, phone interview with the author, August 19, 2013.
29. Steve Reich Collection, PSS.
30. Daly 1990. Reich also referred to Rushdie in Kidron 1989.
31. Carey Perloff, email correspondence with the author, July 16, 2013.
32. D. L. West 2003, 3.
33. Pappé 2006, 194–204.
34. Beryl Korot, phone interview with the author, August 19, 2013.
35. “Jonathan Cott Interviews Beryl Korot and Steve Reich on The Cave (1993),”
in Reich 2002b, 177–78.
36. Beryl Korot, phone interview with the author, August 19, 2013.
37. Nick Mangano, phone interview with the author, September 23, 2013.
“We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece” 109

38. The final entry in Reich’s 1992 agenda is from October 16 and contains the
complete text of Genesis 16:12.
39. Reich had ample speech samples to draw from and was thus able to se-
lect those that conformed to his large-scale tonal planning. On Reich’s process of
transcribing and arranging, see Ebright 2014, 117–25.
40. “Jonathan Cott Interviews Beryl Korot and Steve Reich on The Cave (1993),”
in Reich 2002b, 175–77.
41. Overt American political involvement in the Middle East and, more specifi-
cally, Israel stretches back to the formation of Israel and the beginnings of the Cold
War, when the United States sought to align the new, socialist-leaning Ben-Gurion
state with Western interests. On the influence of the United States on Israeli culture
and politics, see Segev 2002.
42. Kershaw 1992, 16–17.
43. On Reich’s work with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, see Cole 2012;
Gopinath 2011. Indeed, the direct precedent in Reich’s work for mixing live musical
performance with film is his music for Robert Nelson’s Oh Dem Watermelons. On
the various forms that art’s political efficacy might take, see especially Rancière 2010,
134–40.
44. On Klinghoffer’s reception, see Fink 2005a; Longobardi 2009.
45. On Different Trains and the idea of “secondary witness,” see Wlodarski 2010.
46. Martin 2006, 10. On the intersections of The Cave and the documentary the-
ater tradition, see Ebright 2014, 133–43. On the increasing reliance on oral history
and the authority of the witness in documentary theater of the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries, see also Paget 2009, 235–36. On documentary theater,
see also Bechtel 2007; Dawson 1999; Youker 2012.
PART II
REPETITION, SPEECH,
AND IDENTITY
5

Repetition, Speech, and Authority in Steve

Reich’s “Jewish” Music

Robert Fink

BD: Will there ultimately be a town of Friendship?

SR: I’m not a prophet; I’m only a poor composer. So I have no idea.
BD: I hope you’re better than a poor composer! [Laughs]
SR: Well, I mean, compared to a prophet.1

Exodus 4:9–10

Good New Ideas Usually Turn Out to Be Old

What happened to Steve Reich? This was the question circulating at a recent
scholarly conference on musical minimalism, during a searching session de-
voted to historical analysis of repetitive music and cultural politics.2 Surveying
the long arc of Reich’s career, participants became aware of an uncomfortable
truth:  that repetition in Reich’s music, though it may have started out as an
avant-garde gesture accompanying conventionally liberal attitudes, had, over
the years, increasingly been put in the service of traditionalist, conservative pol-
itics, and even, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, something disturb-
ingly close to xenophobia. Reich’s optimistic 1970 prediction, that “the pulse and
the concept of clear tonal center” would be the future of new music, has come
true, but, it seems, with politically complex results. Sometime around the mil-
lennium, minimalist repetition, once associated with antihegemonic thought

113
114 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

and action, began to harmonize with geopolitical rhetorics of power, as both

modernist and feminist critics have long warned us it could.3
How, then, might we trace a changing politics of repetition across Steve
Reich’s musical career? First, we need a point of articulation, some pivot be-
tween the early, questioning Reich of the 1960s—by no means a hippie, but a
restless prodigal son, at least, cum center-left secular Jewish intellectual—and
the twenty-first-century musical patriarch who now appears to have found his
answers, who increasingly sees even the disruptive innovations of his early ca-
reer as a return to intellectual certainties from the past:

In retrospect, I understand the process of gradually shifting phase relationships

between two or more identical repeating patterns as an extension of the idea
of infinite canon or round . . . that this new process bears a close family resem-
blance to the thirteenth century musical idea of round seems to give it some
depth. Good new ideas generally turn out to be old.4

It’s Gonna Rain, the work Reich is discussing, was written in 1965, but his
repositioning of its repetitive tape loops as an “infinite canon” comes from his
collection of writings on music, first published in 1974; it is thus roughly con-
temporaneous with his return to Jewish orthodoxy, and his first encounters with
Hebrew liturgical language and the rabbinical cantillation systems developed to
render it audible.5 The first fruit of Reich’s subsequent study of accent markings
(ta’amim) in Semitic cantillation was Tehillim (1981), also his first texted work
since the speech-based tape works of 1965–67. Taking advantage of the fact that
the Psalms have no canonical tradition of Ashkenazi liturgical performance,
Reich composed what by his own account are musically “traditional” settings
of the Hebrew text,6 highlighting his ability to construct patterns of changing
meter that mirror precisely its spoken accent patterns when sung.
Tehillim was a breakthrough piece for Reich, who had been enduring a fallow
compositional period after producing his summary masterwork of patterned
repetition, Music for 18 Musicians, in 1976.7 With its achievement, he effec-
tively abandoned the complex of repetitive rhythmic processes—phase shifting,
beat-class pattern filling, systematic augmentation and diminution—that had
dominated his work, singly and in combination, since their genesis in his first
experiments with taped speech loops in 1965.8 Reich’s desire to set a biblical text
rendered those repetition techniques irrelevant, pushing him toward a direct
re-engagement with the “musical” aspects of emotionally heightened speech
explored by his early tape works. Tehillim is, in this view, a conscious rewriting
of the speech-song of It’s Gonna Rain. But where the earlier work used an over-
load of looping and dubbing to fix the listener’s attention on the way “[black]
Pentecostal preaching hovers between speaking and singing,”9 the new piece
parcels out repeats according to the composer’s new view of his earlier speech-
based work as essentially traditional and (in both senses of the word) canonic.
Over a pulsating, nonmotivic accompaniment, each biblical verse is set as a
Repetition, Speech, and Authority 115

single melodic phrase without internal repeats; repetitive textures occur only
during literal four-part canons built up in the outer movements.
Reich explained in an accompanying program note that he deliberately
avoided his characteristic “repetition of short patterns” in order to be “as
faithful to the Hebrew text as possible,” using music to make both accent pat-
tern and meaning immediately comprehensible. In a strikingly awkward yet em-
phatic turn of phrase, itself repetitively stuttering and yet strangely passive, he
described how the decision to abandon repetitive process was all but forced on
him: “Returning then to the question about repetition as a musical technique,
my reason for limiting it to repetition of complete verses of the Psalm text is
basically that, based on my musical intuition, the text demanded this kind of
setting.” Eight years later, as he began serious work on his “documentary opera,”
The Cave (1993), submission to the (voice in the) text was again experienced as
an ineluctable command: “What I found was that once I had chosen the text, the
text then forced me to do things musically I would not otherwise have done. This
I found to be extremely stimulating.”10

Argument: Speech, Music, and Repetition in The Cave

I am going to make overt a hermeneutic strategy that the alert reader, primed
by the epigraphs to this chapter, might already have registered with some sur-
prise: bracketing Reich’s return to Jewish orthodoxy with a renewed attention
to text setting and the abandonment of instrumental repetition, I  am casting
the postminimalist composer in the role of musical prophet. Yielding, under
duress, to an inner call to prophesy is, one might argue, the master trope for any
self-identified Jewish creative artist; thus it’s not surprising to find that Reich’s
original plan for what became Tehillim was to set an excerpt from the book of
Jonah, the paradigmatic reluctant preacher of God’s word.11 In what follows,
I  want to lay out terms upon which one might consider the relationship be-
tween repetition, speech, and prophetic authority in the music of Steve Reich, a
complex and contradictory set of relations encapsulated in the biblical figure of
Moses, the stuttering Prophet, who was both the vessel for divine truth and un-
able to master the rhythms of articulate speech. (He was, to quote a phrase that
has been variously and ingeniously glossed for millennia, “slow of tongue.12”)
The point here is not to become caught in the biblical content of Reich’s
“Jewish” works, or to imply that Reich’s re-encounter with his own Judaism nec-
essarily drove his worldly politics in a conservative direction. (It does appear
that this happened, but making that case will not be my focus.) Rather, I want
to consider the way the innate repetitiveness of musical discourse—a funda-
mental constituent of “the musical” foregrounded by minimalism—both fosters
and undermines the power of the spoken texts that Reich increasingly placed
at the center of his work during this pivotal period.13 In Reich’s own telling,
116 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

composing Tehillim meant acceding to a voice in his head—he called it his mu-
sical intuition—that insisted he make his music speak the truth, by subjecting
it to the musical demands of speech as truth. But what is that “truth”? In the
shifting interactions between composed music and sampled speech over the
course of The Cave, what the text(s) “demand” is never clear, and a delicately
negotiated politics of speech and its repetition must be reconstructed, some-
times measure by measure.
Almost a decade in conceptual development and production, The Cave
will likely retain its position as the most ambitious single project in the linked
careers of Reich and his longtime partner, video artist Beryl Korot. The work,
whose eponymous subject, the Cave of the Patriarchs, is believed by both Jews
and Muslims to be the burial place of Abraham, the first prophet of Yahweh,
is strongly didactic on at least three levels. Juxtaposing texts from the Torah
and Koran with contemporary interviews, The Cave’s libretto attempts to show
that Axial Age historical and cultural roots underlie the current Arab-Israeli
conflict; the staging of the opera deploys a wide range of language-bearing
media—including videotaped speech and handwriting, live performance of
sung text, and animated computer display of typed/printed texts—to both com-
municate its argument and privilege speech over writing in a characteristically
Western way; and, as a musical composition, The Cave presents a catalog of
techniques by which repetition, in particular canonic imitation, might mediate
between the musical potential of spoken discourse and the discursive potential
of musical sound.
The current discussion will bracket off the political controversy attendant
on the first aspect of The Cave to focus on its second aspect: the battle, carefully
staged by Reich and Korot, between the epistemological claims of speech, song,
and writing. It is designed as a theoretical prolegomenon to a larger critical-
analytical study of the third aspect, the evolving way in which The Cave’s mu-
sical repetitions interact with the melody and rhythm of the sampled speech on
which the opera is built. To understand this last aspect, and thereby develop a
reading of Reich’s language-based operatic politics, one must first interrogate his
long-standing and oft-expressed belief that “natural” speech is an expressively
“true” marker of identity in ways that other linguistic forms are not. Reich’s
privileging of talking over writing and singing goes all the way back to apologias
for his earliest tape works; it places the composer within a logocentric tradition
that encompasses not only the European philosophers he studied in college but
also the prophetic Hebrew writings with which he began to engage seriously
only in his midthirties.
Let me orient the reader of the present chapter with a synopsis of what de-
tailed textual analysis might eventually tell us about the larger relationship
between speech and repetition in Reich’s “Jewish” period. In general, pulsed
repetition of speech fragments, in the early tape pieces a generator by itself,
automatically, of the listener’s perception that sampled speech has melody and
Repetition, Speech, and Authority 117

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

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

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

way a given person talks. At the time of The Cave, Reich held and expressed
expansive views on the epistemic power of musical speech:  “In our Western
languages, speech melody hovers over all our conversations, giving them their
fine emotional meaning. . . . We are, with speech melody, in an area of human
behavior where music, meaning, and feeling are completely fused.”15 For Reich,
the distinctive cadences of the human voice, if reproduced in a work of art trans-
parently enough, can give the listener access to subjectivity and individuality
directly, without any sense of mediation. The person speaking is just . . . there:
Using the voice of individual speakers is not like setting a text—it’s setting a
human being. A human being is personified by his or her voice. If you record
me, my cadences, the way I speak are just as much me as any photograph of
me. When other people listen to that they feel a persona present.16
Reich first made this claim of presence in regard to his tape works (the
preceding passage is from a program note for It’s Gonna Rain, probably written
a few years after the work’s 1965 premiere). At about the same time, he played
theatrically on the relationship between recorded speech melody and physical
presence in a “live” electronic work. My Name Is (1967) was a site-specific
phasing piece employing multiple tape loops, realized in front of an audi-
ence on three lo-fidelity portable players. But rather than field recordings, the
vocal raw material was sourced from audience members themselves, waylaid
as they entered the concert, saying (they of course did not know why) “My
name is—” followed by a first name. As Reich later noted, “hearing your name
that way tends to get to people,” especially since, having no idea that their
voice would be at the center of a musical composition, most people identified
themselves “in an offhand way.” But the effect of My Name Is goes beyond
this ironic shock of self-recognition. Theoretically, it is an almost perfect
representation of what Jacques Derrida, writing in that same year, called out
in his Of Grammatology as the underlying fiction of linguistics, that human
thought is based on an original “self-present voice” that transmits “the most
immediate, natural, and direct signification” of meaning from subject to sub-
ject.17 My Name Is confronted select members of its audience with the most
direct possible artistic representation of Derrida’s “s’entendre parler” (hearing/
understanding-oneself-speak):  the amplified sound, repeated over and over,
and then elaborated in three-part phased counterpoint, of their own recorded
voices, captured announcing and then pronouncing their own first names,
sound-images that pointed, precisely, to themselves, the people there, listening.
(There is no record of how 1967 audiences physically reacted to the piece as
self-presence; did they crane their heads, trying to match the exuberant call
and response of recorded voices to the actual, silent bodies around them?)18
Reich’s tape loops, constructed in absentia while the concert’s first half was in
progress, functioned during the performance according to Derrida’s logic of
the trace, the mechanical recording of the past onto the present, the absence
Repetition, Speech, and Authority 119

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

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

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

self-abnegating authorial position. Thanks in part to his idiosyncratic reading

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

Language Layers 1 and 2: Questions and Answers

The five framing questions are the deepest, oldest layer of The Cave. As in the
original theatrical game of presence, Reich’s My Name Is (1967), the first move,
the querying of identity that elicits the speech material from which the piece
will be made, is not itself allowed to become part of that material. In a fasci-
nating choice that reverberates through The Cave, the first question—Who is
Abraham?—appears in writing. Is this an anti-logocentric gesture? Well, I didn’t
use the gerundive casually: the words are not (already) written and then shown;
rather, it is precisely the process of writing that appears, by hand, filmed in extreme
Repetition, Speech, and Authority 121

Figure 5.1 Original stage set of The Cave (1993), showing the use of video screens during
a “talking head” section.

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

abrasive rhythmic canon, analogous to the three-part canonic processes in

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

Who is Abraham? Abraham, for me, is my ancestor—my very own personal

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

It is hard to imagine a more perfectly logocentric text. It not only is speech,

it is about speech, used in precisely the way that privileges speech in Platonic
metaphysics, as a method of face-to-face, mnemonic instruction, in which pa-
triarchal truth, the “intelligent word,” is “graven in the soul of the learner.”30 As
Derrida notes, “It is precisely logos that enables us to perceive and investigate
something like paternity,”31 and, speaking directly to the camera, The Cave’s first
interviewee, the only one allowed to go on uninterrupted at such length, testifies
to the metaphysical effect of the (spoken) word of his father:  “I was brought
up to think like that, and I still, I guess, think like that. It stuck in my mind.”
Socrates himself could not have asked for more.32
Isaac’s speech is an extreme example of Reich and Korot’s general procedure
in the second layer of the work, which preserves, like a fossil, Reich’s unrealized
1975 idea for Portraits. During these documentary sections, although the sound
of speech is pervasively repeated and imitated in sound, the visual “repetition”
of sound by the written word is conspicuously absent; captions, translations, or
inscriptions do not clutter the multichannel mise en scène that Korot generates
Repetition, Speech, and Authority 123

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

Language Layers 3 and 4: Chant and Scripture

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

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

Orthography, Rhythm, and the “Voice” in the Text (The

Cave, Act 1, Scene 1, “Opening Typing Music”)

Let us consider the first of these scriptural episodes in more detail. The Cave
begins with an instrumental movement, in which the English text of Genesis
16:1–12 is “read,” not by vocalists, but by the percussionists of the Steve Reich
Ensemble, who translate its irregular speech rhythms directly into sound (Ex.
5.1). A detailed look at the stage picture created in this opening scene (Figure
5.2, taken from a 2011 production in Strasbourg), shows how even simplified
versions of the original staging preserve Korot’s design, which counterpoises
to these rhythms the presence of writing itself as a “character,” playing its part
in the dramatic argument as both opaque visual sign and carrier of logos.
Since no one is actually speaking the parenthetical text in Reich’s score, there
is no talking head channel; all five video screens, which form a rough three-
over-two arch, are filled with writing. The two lower and outer screens present
static, matching images of the Torah, so tightly cropped that the words bleed
Example 5.1 Reich, The Cave, act 1, scene 1, mm. 10–30.

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

off their edges. For a typical audience, these texts, handwritten in special sa-
cred calligraphy, will not be legible; even those fluent in modern Hebrew cannot
“sight-read” them, since it has never been permitted to write the necessary di-
acritical marks for speech (vowels, punctuation, and cantillation signs) directly
onto the scrolls. The relation (or, rather, nonrelation) between this unreadable,
heavily cropped Masoretic inscription and the nonvocal “reading” of the speech
rhythms arising from its simultaneous translation into (unheard) English is at
the heart of my interpretation of the opera. This relation produces a short cir-
cuit of meaning that Derrida associates with the trace, the written mark in its
subversive, “pictorial” aspect:  “all that gives rise to an inscription in general,
whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the
order of the voice.”41 Thus alienated, these traces of (hand)written Hebrew are
very nearly reduced to silent, symmetrical pieces of set decoration.
What saves them, paradoxically, is Korot’s careful attention to orthography,
the distributive “art” of placing words on the page. Hebrew is read from right
to left; but, if one looks closely, the initial indentation implies that each line
of Genesis 16 begins on the left screen and continues, roughly, sometimes
overlapping, onto the screen at right. The two incomprehensible pictures we see
are, in fact, two cropped instances of a single text—but to put the pieces back
together, one must go up (aliyah) and over, and this clockwise path runs right
through a very different style of writing onstage.42 The upper three screens of the
stage arch present modern translations of the biblical text in white serifed letters
against a black background: English appears at the center, flanked by German
and French. At one level, this polyglot display epitomizes what deconstruction
finds to be the tautological nature of writing as pure repetition of itself. All the
texts “say” the same thing, that is to say, they repeat each other’s signs, but, as
when Hebrew script is presented without vowels or punctuation, we don’t hear
the voice there.
Or, rather, we do hear it, but, to coin a perceptual oxymoron, we hear pri-
marily with the eye, and only indirectly with the ear. Reich’s printed score for
The Cave (see Ex. 5.1) discloses that each word of the English text is pinned to
a percussive accent within a grid of changing instrumental accent patterns that
correspond to its spoken accentuation. Although the percussion group includes
drums, clapping, and pieces of wood (a syllabus of Reich’s favorite instruments
across the 1970s), it is built around the three lines of “Typing Music” that give
the opening movement its name. One typist is designated for each modern lan-
guage used onstage, and each executes paradiddles on an actual computer key-
board whose heavily amplified key clicks are mixed into the sound stage as part
of the percussion battery. As the English-language text appears, word by word,
on the top-center screen, in time with the key clicks of the first typist, we wit-
ness a disorienting remapping of the logos. The printed scripture (that is, a me-
chanically reproduced simulacrum of writing) is presented to us perceptually
Repetition, Speech, and Authority 127

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

Of Musical Grammatology (in the Age of Digital Repetition)

It may seem perverse to approach Steve Reich’s attitude toward speech, music,
and authority in opera by closely reading a passage in which no actual voices
partake. But given the familiarity most listeners and critics have with Reich’s
defense of speech melody from the excesses of operatic song—the way his
documentary aesthetic disciplines all “inappropriate” musical responses to a
politically charged situation by foregrounding the melodies and rhythms of
recorded speech about it—what Tomlinson identifies as the other, equally im-
portant front of a three-way battle, the grammatological clash between speech
and writing, deserves its full report as well. From this perspective, the striking
vocal innovation of Reich’s Jewish period, the choice to write speech melodies
directly into his scores, might seem to put the composer on the wrong side
of the logos. But, as Tomlinson notes, the very music notation that Reich em-
ployed for the task “work[s] in intimate complicity with the logocentrism that
has determined our orderings of speech, song, and writing.”46 Musical writing
began as a way of doing for singing what the written word did for speech; that
is, allow for the possibility of its accurate reproduction in the absence of the
speaker/singer. Once the voices do come in, this primal “transitive” function
of musical writing quite audibly drives compositional developments in The
Cave. Consider Example 5.2, from act 1, scene 7, a characteristic passage in
which Reich begins with direct instrumental doubling of a speaking voice,
thus suturing his written trace to immanent sonic presence. The composer
then does what any composer would “naturally” do: he harnesses the fungi-
bility of musical notation, its adaptability to reproduction by any musical in-
strument, to transmit the speech’s musical essence to a waiting group of string
players, who imitate and then canonically extend its characteristic rhythmic
and melodic gestures.
A clearer musical allegory for logocentrism can hardly be imagined; the in-
strumental ensemble internalizes and then reproduces the melos of a patriarch’s
speech, participating in an orchestrated version of the mnemonic scene of in-
struction so privileged by Platonic thought.47 (The speaker here is biochemist
and secular rabbi Yeshayahu Leibowitz, one of the most revered Israeli public
intellectuals of the twentieth century.) But the entire thrust of Derrida’s
grammatology is that subordinating any kind of writing to speech-as-truth in
this way imposes an arbitrary limit on writing’s own power to engender the
free play of signifiers. Notation, whether linguistic or musical, need not al-
ways be so  .  .  .  literal. (“Literally” is the adverb Reich uses to describe how
musical instruments should imitate speech in The Cave.)48 Marks on a page—
ancient inscriptions, let us say—laid down without vowels or punctuation,
then photographed and projected on a screen, might point not to the original,
metaphysical presence of chanted speech but to other texts, written in other
Repetition, Speech, and Authority 129

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

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

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

Reich seems, on the one hand, to follow the speakers almost slavishly with
his music; but, on the other, thanks to the montage of words and phrases, the
Repetition, Speech, and Authority 131

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

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

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

Notes

1. Steve Reich [SR] interview with radio host Bruce Duffie [BD], November
1995 (www.bruceduffie.com/reich.html). The “town of Friendship” is the West Bank
city of Hebron, site of the Cave of the Patriarchs at the center of Reich’s 1993 opera,
The Cave; Reich had previously noted that the Arabic name of the city, El Halil, refers
to Abraham and means “the friend.”
2. This session, held at the Fourth International Conference on Music
and Minimalism at Long Beach, CA, October 3–6, 2013, was titled “Politics and
Memory,” and featured papers by John Pymm, Celia Casey, Ryan Hepburn, and
Andrea Moore. This chapter owes its genesis in part to their insights, and to those
of the conference participants, especially Ryan Ebright and Sasha Metcalf, for which
I am grateful. Any flaws in argumentation or evidence are, of course, my own.
3. On minimalism’s “rhetoric of power,” see Chave 1990. The high-modernist
rejection of minimalist repetition as akin to the structure of reactionary discourses
like fascism and advertising is diagnosed in Fink 2005b, especially 62–67. It is be-
yond the scope of this chapter to give a full account of how antihegemonic Steve
Reich’s early essays in repetitive music actually were; crucial recuperative work on
voice, race, and politics has already appeared in Scherzinger 2005, Gopinath 2009
and 2011, and, most recently, in challenging counterpoint with whiteness studies
and psychoanalytic theory (see Biareishyk 2012). At the 2013 session, Pymm
Repetition, Speech, and Authority 133

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

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

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

bracket these words off as “outside of the performance,” at least provisionally. (The
echo of Derrida’s hors-du-texte is deliberate, and signals the provisional nature of
this interpretive move.)
34. Korot in Reich 2002b, 174.
35. Reich 2002b, 83.
36. In fact, he could not have fitted this long speech into the sampling keyboard
he was using in the late 1980s; even at a sub-CD quality sample rate of 36 kHz, the
Casio FZ-1 could hold only fifteen seconds of audio (see Ebright 2014, 110n18).
37. Tomlinson 1995, 350.
38. Reich 2002b, 114. The observation that “the word ‘inappropriate’ often sig-
nals [Reich’s] moral anxieties” comes from Sumanth Gopinath (personal communi-
cation with the author, 2015).
39. The English text does not correspond exactly to any widely circulated trans-
lation. It most closely follows a 1917 translation “from the Masoretic text” by the
Jewish Publication Society (JPS Tanakh, 1917), with updated pronouns and some
streamlined phrasing. This version is close in diction and cadence to the familiar
King James Version. I  have not been able to identify the French and German
translations used.
40. Reich and Korot have always maintained that their collaboration is equal.
Korot took full responsibility for the video design of The Cave in interviews: “He
gave me the audio for the talking-heads channel. It was up to me to provide the rest
and make it work with the score” (in Reich 2002b, 172). As one might well anticipate,
given the speech-song-writing tensions surveyed earlier, a consistent critical com-
plaint about The Cave has been that, until its third act, where American vernacular
speech rhythms come to the fore, Reich’s music is too austere and self-limiting, and
is consequently overshadowed by Korot’s multiple video screens.
41. Derrida 1997, 9.
42. The Hebrew expression aliyah, “to go up,” refers both to ascending the pulpit
as a reader of Torah and to returning to the Jewish homeland in Palestine.
43. “Writing would indeed be the signifier’s capacity to repeat itself by itself, me-
chanically, without a living soul to sustain or attend it in its repetition, that is to say,
without truth’s presenting itself anywhere” (Derrida 1997, 111).
44. Reich’s linguistic nativism at the time of The Cave was unapologetic; he freely
admitted that requiring all the interviewees to answer in English ironed out their
distinctive speech rhythms in a way that could be imagined as utopian or imperial-
istic depending on your sympathies: “What I found was that in terms of the different
speech-melodies of these groups of speakers, the English language proved to be the
great equalizer. There was no characteristic Israeli or Palestinian speech-melody dis-
tinct from that of Americans. In general, it was speaking English that dominated the
rhythm and cadence of the speakers. The syllables, with their rhythms and accents,
dominated the speech melody of all the speakers” (Reich 2002b, 194). For Reich it
was self-evident that if he, the composer, could not understand intuitively the rela-
tionship of sound-image and meaning in the spoken language with which he was
working, there was no possibility that his musical transcriptions would work.
Repetition, Speech, and Authority 137

45. The only live recording of The Cave available for study is a low-fidelity, single-
camera documentation of the majority of act 1 as it was performed in Strasbourg at
the Musica Festival in 2011 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9MTxLCv_nw,
accessed November 28, 2015). It isn’t possible from this video, whose audio track
appears to be mixed in mono throughout, to determine whether the mix in the hall
had the same stereophonic spatial dimensions as the 1993 studio recording.
46. Tomlinson 1995, 355.
47. It is worth noting that the actual string players in a performance of The
Cave do not play along with the first appearance of a given speech sample; as the
score notes, the instrumental doubling you hear there is also a sample, coordinated
through MIDI, and thus under the direct control of the composer/conductor. Only
after hearing (and thus, symbolically, being instructed by) the MIDI sampler do the
live string players begin to play their parts.
48. “In order to combine the taped speech with the string instruments, I selected
small speech samples that are more or less clearly pitched, then transcribed them as
accurately as possible into musical notation. The strings then literally imitate that
speech melody” (Reich 2002b, 152).
49. Derrida 1997, 84.
50. Reich’s vocal transcriptions have been ideologically controversial for some
time now. Both Gopinath (2004) and Scherzinger (2005) express serious moral
qualms about Reich’s attempts to capture the essence of African voices, either on tape
or in drummed rhythms. Scherzinger (2005, n23), taking issue with the way Potter
(2000) notates the vocal snippet at the heart of It’s Gonna Rain, implies, I think, that
the composer himself misheard it—a claim that Gopinath (2004, 140–41) makes
explicitly about the percussive vocables Reich imitated in Drumming. Both are
concerned with Reich’s appropriative hearing of non-Western voices, but I suspect
neither would be surprised at an argument, like the present one, that extends the
logic of notation as “appropriation” to all spoken voices, European or otherwise,
and then reverses it. Why should we believe that any writing could capture spoken
presence without distortion? Is not appropriation-and-distortion inherent in the act
of writing itself? Gopinath calls Reich’s transcription “an ethnographic fantasy of
self-validation,” and it surely is. Reich would surely be insulted by the implication of
ethnocentrism, but perhaps a degree of fantasy and self-mythologizing is inherent to
all Western musical writing and, thus, not his unique moral failure: “At the moment
of generating a musical notation—moments like those in the Middle Ages, of capital
importance for European music history—alphabetic writing declares this absence.
By this generation, it moves to capture in its own inscriptive terms an aspect of sung
utterance that will always escape it” (Tomlinson 1995, 377).
51. Luttikhuis 1993.
52. Oestreich 1999.
53. Driver 1993.
54. Hall 2006.
55. Maycock 1993.
56. Rothstein 1993.
138 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

57. Reich 2002b, 101.

58. Derrida 1997, 71.
59. Reich 2002b, 129.
60. See Brown, Driver, and Briggs 1994, commentary on Strong’s H6957.
61. See Fink 2011.
6

Steve Reich’s Dramatic Sound Collage

for the Harlem Six
Toward a Prehistory of Come Out

John Pymm

The story of the premiere of Steve Reich’s Come Out at a benefit event at Town
Hall, New York, on Sunday, April 17, 1966, has been well rehearsed, not least
by the composer himself.1 Played as the concluding item of the evening, the
piece underscored a monetary collection to fund independent lawyers for the
retrial of the Harlem Six, a group of six young African Americans who had been
wrongly charged with murder.2 Lasting 13:36, Come Out would have seemed
well-suited for this purpose, providing ample time for several collecting hats
to be passed around the mainly occupied fifteen hundred seats of Town Hall.
While attention was no doubt focused on passing the hat, members of the au-
dience might have recognized in Come Out the voice of its protagonist, Daniel
Hamm, from a sound collage they had heard earlier in the evening, created for
the occasion by Reich as part of a dramatization of Truman Nelson’s book The
Torture of Mothers.
This context inevitably nuanced the audience’s experience of hearing Come
Out, potentially imbuing the piece with layers of meaning that have subse-
quently proved difficult to excavate for those familiar with the work only as
a freestanding tape piece. Now accessible in the collection of Reich’s archival
materials in the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, the sound collage received no fur-
ther outings following its premiere, and the composer has made scant refer-
ence to it in the five decades since the benefit,3 and never by its original title of
Harlem’s Six Condemned.4 The meager 327 words devoted to Come Out in Reich’s
Writings on Music give no clue as to the existence of a sound collage. I  shall
argue in this chapter, however, that a close reading of Harlem’s Six Condemned
enables us to rethink and deepen our understanding of Come Out by tracing its
prehistory and setting a broader context for appreciating both pieces.
The rethinking of the significance of Come Out has been taking shape for
well over a decade, suggesting diminishing levels of interest in its importance
as a phase piece and a growing awareness of issues of racial identity in the
work. Reich has spoken of his selection of speech material being based on the
naturally-occurring melodic contours of Daniel Hamm’s words—“raw speech

139
140 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

material that really had musical content.”5 The composer has also made some
tantalizing acknowledgment of the importance of the identity of the person who
spoke them, the context in which the words were spoken, and the implications
of what was spoken,6 potentially giving a green light to seek layers of meaning
embedded in Come Out.
Keith Potter was among the first to identify the significance of both phonic
and phonemic aspects in the piece, recognizing that Reich’s use of speech mate-
rial in his tape music invites inquiry into their social and cultural contexts. In so
doing, Potter laid the foundations for further scrutiny of narrative strands in the
work.7 Mitchell Morris’s consideration of identity in the work explores Reich’s
treatment of Hamm’s voice “in all its grainy individuality, with its accent and
idiosyncrasies of pace and pronunciation intact . . . describing a specific assault
not only on his bodily integrity but also and more importantly on his claims to
dignity.” By the end of the piece, “we are hearing an audible representation of the
bruise blood itself.”8 In contrast to Morris’s focus on Reich’s crushing of Hamm’s
identity through his relentless method of phasing, Lloyd Whitesell draws atten-
tion to the imbalance between the composer’s authorial voice as a white narrator
and the actual mouthpiece through whom the words are heard, a young black
man. By the end of the piece, Whitesell argues, the narrative journey has taken
us from “black voices [which] are melodious and expressive, occupying the po-
sition of dramatic subjects,” to a point where all distinctive character has been
“drained from the voice objects” and Hamm’s voice has all but dissolved into “an
aural condensation of whiteness” so that Reich’s voice speaks powerfully over—
rather than through—Hamm’s words.9
In the context of what he describes as “the tendency within 1960s aesthetic
utterances . . . to express and even simulate violence through texts and discourse,”10
Sumanth Gopinath offers a more extensive analysis of the political dimensions
of Come Out, seeking to comb out a tangled mass of narrative strands, which
he finds densely woven into the fabric of the piece: “encompassing leftist photo-
documentary and Jewish identity, 60s-era artistic representations of violence,
representations of black urban uprisings, sexualized and exoticized depictions
of black otherness and appropriations of musical Africanisms, fantasies of black
and white paranoia, and the racial economic politics of incarceration.”11
Faced with such knotty complexity, Gopinath establishes three hermeneutic
stages for a discourse on the work: a primary focus on sonic particularities be-
fore moving to a consideration of aesthetic utterance; a consideration of the
historical framework of the Harlem Six case as a means of interpreting the work;
and finally an understanding of the piece as a political work of art on the basis
that Reich himself has referred to it as such, while recognizing that the func-
tion of the piece is as significant as its content. To these may now be added two
more: the context of the original benefit event, and a close reading of Reich’s
sound collage that held pride of place on the program.
Reich’s Sound Collage for the Harlem Six 141

At first sight, Harlem’s Six Condemned appears as something of a historical cu-

riosity, a piece of verbatim theater with minimal musical content created for a site-
specific event, which Reich was initially disinclined to produce. After returning to
New York in September 1965,12 Reich met filmmaker Truman Nelson (1911–87),
a Marxist civil rights activist and writer remembered particularly for his biography
of militant abolitionist John Brown (1800–59).13 Nelson set out to persuade Reich
to edit an extensive collection of contemporaneous taped speech material for use
in a planned benefit event for the retrial of the Harlem Six. In his December 1987
interview with Ev Grimes for the Oral History of American Music, Reich recalled
his discussions with Nelson about creating music for the benefit event:
It turned out [Nelson] had ten reels of reel to reel tape of interview with the
police, mothers of six black kids, the six black kids, all of which concerned the
murder of a white woman in I guess it was the Bronx in 1964, which murder
happened, but for which six black kids were arrested . . . and so they wanted
to do a benefit at Town Hall and as one of the little details on the program,
they wanted me to edit these tapes down to some sort of little scenario that
Truman Nelson gave me so that it could be used as a dramatic sound collage.
I explained to him that this was not my stock in trade, but that I would do it on
one condition, and the condition was that if I found something in all this mass
of tape that I wanted to make a piece out of, he would let me do that. He said,
“What do you mean, a piece?” I said, “Take a listen to this.” I played him It’s
Gonna Rain and good civil rights activist that he was, he really liked it. I think
he felt it had something to do with John Brown, but he didn’t know what. In
any event, I  did the editing as requested and did find this one little phrase
through all this mountain of material where Daniel Hamm, who was one of the
kids who, it turns out, did not do it, said, “I had to like open a bruise up and let
the blood come out to show them I was bleeding.”14
By this stage—albeit twenty-one years after the event—Reich’s memory
had evidently become rather sketchy on several details:  he was unable to re-
call exactly when the murder took place; whether the location was Harlem or
the Bronx; the name of the person who had been murdered; or the significance
that Nelson clearly attached to his desired sound collage as the mainstay of the
benefit, which was considerably greater than might be suggested from its de-
scription as “one of the little details on the program.” Reich’s lasting memory—
and his dominant narrative—of composing Come Out was his abiding hope of
finding a speech snippet with the same musical potential that Brother Walter’s
voice had provided for It’s Gonna Rain, capable of functioning as the melodic
basis for a phase piece.
Despite the composer’s protestations to the contrary, Nelson’s commission
was neither Reich’s first sound collage nor his first work for a benefit. His dis-
missal of sound collages as being not his “stock in trade” is therefore curious,
since by 1965 he had created at least three recordings using the sound-collage
142 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

technique:  The Plastic Haircut (1963), a collage of sounds taken from The
Greatest Moments in Sport, a 1955 LP; Livelihood (1964), a collage of sounds
assembled from recordings Reich made as a taxi driver in San Francisco; and a
preparatory tape collage he made for It’s Gonna Rain (1965), also based on his
own field recordings in Union Square, San Francisco, in June 1964.15 Reich’s lack
of enthusiasm for what was set to become his fourth sound collage is conceiv-
ably explained by a preference for his newfound phasing technique rather than
the editing of tapes, possibly intensified by a desire to leave behind a style he as-
sociated with his time in California. Additionally, Nelson’s commission offered
a constrained structure involving existing spoken material that allowed Reich
little of the narrative freedom he had enjoyed in previous sound collages.
While in San Francisco, Reich had also gained some experience of producing
work for a benefit concert with the stated aim of raising money for a political
cause. The performance of his Event III in February 1964 was a benefit for “Civil
Rights activists seeking to integrate the workforce of San Francisco’s Sheraton-
Palace Hotel.”16 Given such a pedigree in activist art, it is curious that Reich
should express such strong doubts as to the power of art generally—and music
specifically—in effecting political transformation,17 as evidenced in a 1992 in-
terview with K. Robert Schwarz:
I can’t think of any major political changes in the world that were effected
by a change in art. Picasso’s Guernica is an overwhelming masterpiece, but it
still didn’t stop aerial bombing for two seconds! So I’d say, show me, where is
the political art that has made the slightest difference? These are just private
preoccupations of musicians. I don’t see that the political history of the world
has been influenced by the arts of any given time. I think the opposite: that the
arts reflect the political reality around them. They are the unconscious mirror
of that.18
Nonetheless, Reich’s agreement to participate in the Town Hall benefit suggests—
at least at that stage in his career—some measure of belief in the potential of
the event, if not the music, to influence politically the situation of the Harlem
Six; and with hindsight the composer has been lavish in his assessment of the
benefit’s success in achieving social justice for the youths.19
The benefit itself was clearly a significant undertaking, as indicated by the
size of venue hired for the evening. Financial backing was sought in advance of
the occasion, which would become—together with the retiring collection and
sponsorship from the Charter Group for a Pledge of Conscience—the prin-
cipal means of covering costs, as well as raising money for the desired retrial
of the Six.20 Nelson was evidently successful in garnering the support of several
individuals who might have yielded such influence, including “attorney Howard
N.  Meyer; authors Nat Hentoff and Maxwell Geismar; Professors Staughton
Lynd, Dan Dodson, and Eleanor Leacock; playwright Howard da Silva; and a
number of other academic and professional people.”21
Reich’s Sound Collage for the Harlem Six 143

Pre-event publicity drew attention to the reputation of those scheduled to

perform live onstage. Under the banner “New York Meetings Slated to Defend
Harlem Victims,” The Militant, a Socialist newspaper, “published in the interests
of working people,” attempted to attract interest on the basis of the involvement
of well-known names associated with the civil rights struggle:
NEW YORK—Dick Gregory, Ossie Davis, and William Stringfellow will ap-
pear at Town Hall Sunday, April 17, at a public meeting to protest the con-
viction of the so-called Harlem Six and to raise funds for their appeal. The
program, to begin at 8  p.m., will include a dramatization of The Torture of
Mothers by Truman Nelson, narrated by Davis with a cast of 50 and including
tape recordings testifying to instances of police brutality occurring in Harlem
in the Spring of 1964.22
While it would be tempting to portray the event as an entirely somber occa-
sion, those taking a lead spanned a range of performance styles from political
oratory to comedy. Ossie Davis (1917–2005) and Dick Gregory (1932–2017)
had both developed reputations as social activists. Davis was an eminent actor,
director, and playwright, and Gregory—who acted as MC for the evening and
had also previously been an advocate for the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s A
Minstrel Show—was a comedian. Although less prominent as a campaigner than
the other two, William Stringfellow (1928–85) also spoke as a representative of
the Charter Group, the main sponsors of the benefit. An attorney and author,
Stringfellow was a Harvard Law School graduate and, subsequently, a radical
theologian who had made his home in a slum tenement in Harlem.
The dramatization of The Torture of Mothers took pride of place on both
the program and the publicity material, while Come Out received no mention
whatsoever, either here or in subsequent press reporting. On April 18, 1966,
the New York Times carried a brief review of the events of the previous evening
entitled “Benefit Aids Appeal of 6 Convicted of Harlem Killing.” The Militant
carried a more extensive report by Herman Porter on Monday, April 25, 1966.
Under the headline “Benefit in New  York Aids Legal Defense of Harlem 6,”
Porter provides a more comprehensive account of the proceedings at Town Hall.
During the dramatization of The Torture of Mothers, the mothers sat on the stage
while the young men’s story was relayed through their own voices on tape; this
was interspersed with Davis’s narration and would seem to be the point at which
Reich’s sound collage was played, although neither it nor Come Out is specifi-
cally mentioned.
Civil rights attorney Conrad Lynn spoke, explaining how he had become in-
volved in the case and how the youths had been denied legal representation
of their own choosing. Another speaker was Nathan Schwerner, a retired wig
maker whose son, Michael, was one of three civil rights workers who had been
murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in 1964. Truman
Nelson, who was apparently seated in the audience rather than onstage, was
144 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

introduced and also said a few words; finally, in addition to functioning as MC,
Dick Gregory rounded off the evening with a comedic performance, which
must have immediately preceded the playing of Come Out.23
Come Out was not the only piece of music heard that evening, however, and
Porter reports that the program contained a significant amount of vocal music.
Civil rights activist, vocalist, and songwriter Abbey Lincoln (1930–2010) and
her drummer husband, bebop pioneer Max Roach (1924–2007), performed
a selection from “The Freedom Now Suite.” We Insist! Freedom Now was a
jazz album recorded between August 31 and September 6, 1960 by Candid
Records and contained tracks assembled ultimately for the 1963 centenary of
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The album is an avowedly political work
comprising five songs: “Driva Man,” “Freedom Day,” “Triptych: Prayer/Protest/
Peace,” “All Africa,” and “Tears for Johannesburg,” each written by Max Roach
with lyrics by Oscar Brown (1926–2005).24 Although the studio recordings on
the LP employed a total of nine musicians, the unspecified selection chosen
for the Town Hall benefit was performed by husband-and-wife duo Roach and
Lincoln, appropriately, since they were the only artists to perform on all five of
the recorded tracks on the LP. This music provided the audience with a relatively
radical and new kind of “protest music,” reflecting contemporary tendencies in
jazz, and had an immediacy by virtue of being performed live, which Come
Out was powerless to match as a tape piece. Since hardly any of the audience
members would have been familiar with Reich’s phasing process, the particular
style of a phased piece alone would have been unlikely to engage its audience,
let alone persuade them to give money for a political cause.
To appreciate the nature and content of Reich’s sound collage, the events
surrounding the Harlem Six case bear some brief retelling.25 On the afternoon
of Friday April 17, 1964—two years to the day before the benefit concert—
some seemingly minor events at a fruit stall in the street at 368 Lenox Avenue,
New  York, quickly escalated into a riot. During the uproar, Frank Stafford, a
thirty-one-year old African American hosiery salesman, intervened and was
beaten violently by a police officer, which led to Stafford eventually losing an
eye. Others were also caught up in the melee and arrested along with three
teenage black boys, Wallace Baker (nineteen), Daniel Hamm (eighteen), and
Frederick Frazier (sixteen). They were all taken to the Twenty-Eighth Precinct
police station—a place known as the Meat Grinder—and beaten severely
throughout the night.26 The following day, the teenagers were released and a
public meeting was held at Friendship Baptist Community Center on Thirtieth
Street, where Hamm and Baker had an opportunity to recount their experi-
ence of sustained police brutality. It was at this meeting that Nelson’s first set of
recordings was made.
Twelve days later, on Wednesday April 29, 1964, a more serious—but osten-
sibly unrelated—incident took place. Some youths entered a clothing store on
125th Street and Fifth Avenue looking for suits to wear for a Malcolm X rally,
Reich’s Sound Collage for the Harlem Six 145

but having been told by the owners (a Jewish couple, Frank and Margit Sugar)27
that there was nothing in his size, one of the youths stabbed and killed Margit.
Her husband was also attacked but recovered following emergency treatment.
Hungry for an early arrest, police focused their attention on the rooftop
tenements of Harlem where a pigeon club was run by a group of six African
American youths. All six were taken forcibly into custody and beaten to extract
confessions. Daniel Hamm and Robert Rice both signed admissions of guilt,
and on September 8, 1965, all six teenagers—having received inadequate legal
representation—were sentenced to life imprisonment, thus providing the im-
petus to raise money for a lawyer of their mothers’ choosing for a retrial, rather
than the Legal Aid lawyer provided by the court.
The case of the Harlem Six is remembered largely through Truman Nelson’s
book The Torture of Mothers,28 which is based on transcriptions of speech
recordings made on three separate occasions. The first set of tapes was recorded
by a social worker, Willie Jones, for Harlem Youth Unlimited—a community
self-help organization—at the Friendship Baptist Community Center in the im-
mediate aftermath of the police beatings following the fruit stall riot. The other
two tape sources consist of recordings of the mothers made subsequently, one
by Nelson himself and a further set of recordings produced independently by
Willie Jones. Collectively, these account for the ten reels of tape that were given
to Reich, although it cannot be judged whether, or to what extent, Nelson had
already edited the tapes before handing them over.
Since the archival recording of Harlem’s Six Condemned lasts for only 26:46,
it is likely that most of Nelson’s source tapes failed to find their way into Reich’s
sound collage. The scenario that Reich was given remains unknown, but the
layout of the collage closely follows that of Nelson’s book, suggesting that this
was also the scenario he gave to Reich and accounts for why Reich selected al-
most identical source recordings to The Torture of Mothers despite having an ap-
parently extensive collection of tape material from which to choose. The result
is that all but three sections—1, 21, and 23 in Table 6.1—are also transcribed in
The Torture of Mothers.
The enduring appeal of The Torture of Mothers lies in Nelson’s ability to
fashion a persuasive narrative through his selection, transcription, and presen-
tation of audio sources, which are laid out on the printed page in the style of
epic poetry, creating a heightened style of language that contains few features
of black American speech.29 Reich approaches the spoken word with the same
respect that Nelson demonstrates in his transcriptions, avoiding manipulation,
repetition, or looping of the voices on the tapes. Reich embraces this role of
quasi-auteur with enthusiasm, at times shaping and recasting Nelson’s original
structure to create different emphases. The resulting Harlem’s Six Condemned
consists of twenty-nine speech extracts, each containing a single voice, ex-
cept for sections 15 and 28, each of which contains two voices. The sections
are separated by fourteen gaps in total, enigmatically positioned and varying
Table 6.1 Arrangement of tape transcriptions in Steve Reich’s Harlem’s Six Condemned
Section Mothers Harlem Six Others

1 Fruit stall holder

4-second gap
2 Herbert Paine
3 Unidentified
businessman
4 Daniel Hamm
5 Wallace Baker
6 Frank Stafford
10-second gap
7 Daniel Hamm
3-second gap
8 Frank Stafford
16-second gap
9 Daniel Hamm
16-second gap
10 Frank Stafford
4-second gap
11 Daniel Hamm
4-second gap
12 Mrs Baker
13 Frank Stafford
14 Daniel Hamm
15 [duologue] Mrs Baker
Mrs Hamm
7-second gap
16 Daniel Hamm
17 Frank Stafford
9-second gap
18 Mary Hamm
3-second gap
19 Mrs Thomas
20 Mrs Baker
11-second gap
21 Unidentified mother
8-second gap
22 Mrs Hamm
23 Unidentified mother
3-second pause
24 Mrs Craig
3-second pause
25 Mrs Hamm
26 Mrs Rice
27 Mrs Hamm
28 Mrs Baker
Mrs Thomas
29 Daniel Hamm
148 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

in length between three seconds and sixteen seconds. The main exceptions
are between sections 8 and 9 and sections 9 and 10, each of which is punctu-
ated by a gap of sixteen seconds, a pattern repeated between sections 10 and 11
and sections 11 and 12, where there is a shorter but equally regular gap of four
seconds each. The purpose of these gaps is unclear. They may have served a nar-
rative function in allowing space for Dick Gregory to introduce the names of the
speakers on the tape, although there is insufficient space for this to have been
carried out consistently, but the tape could have been stopped and restarted in
case more was said than the mere introduction of names.
There is no record as to how identification of the voices was accomplished
in the original performance and no suggestion that the audience was given a
transcript of the tapes or a copy of Nelson’s book that had by this stage been
published privately. The boys themselves were in prison and could not be present
and, since the mothers sat for the performance of the tape collage, the linkage
between the boys’ voices on the tape with their mothers on the stage would have
been complicated. Harlem’s Six Condemned has three strands in Reich’s narra-
tive, each of which contains a different group of voices. The first strand runs
intermittently from section 1 to 17 and consists of the voices of those caught
up in the riot. The second strand contains the voices of two members of the
Harlem Six, and runs from section 4 to 16, with an additional contribution from
Daniel Hamm in section 29. The third narrative strand comprises the voices of
the mothers, and runs from section 12 to 28. The interweaving of these three
strands produces an overall tripartite structure for the collage. From section
1 to 11, the voices of the Harlem Six and the other witnesses overlap; between
sections 12 and 17, these are joined by the voices of the mothers, and then from
section 18 to 29, the voices of the mothers are allowed to emerge on their own.
Reich’s focus on male voices reflects his chosen title Harlem’s Six Condemned,
contrasting with the female focus of Nelson’s title, The Torture of Mothers.
The collage opens with the voice of Edward DeLuca, the proprietor of the
fruit stall. As he speaks, the cash register rings in the background, locating
him at the exact place where the fruit stand riot happened. DeLuca is the
prime agent in the narrative, since had he not attracted police intervention
the sequence of events would not have unfolded. He is unidentified and one-
dimensional in his single fifty-two-second appearance, although some details
emerge through what he says.30 We learn that the fruit stall is on the street
outside a larger fruit shop (DeLuca is therefore not an itinerant street seller)
and that he was in the back of the shop when one of his employees alerted him
to what was happening outside. The newspaper reports refer to the riot being
started by the antics of children, while DeLuca’s account is gendered: they were
“a mob of young fellows,” and it was “these boys” that DeLuca thought were not
indigenous to Harlem. After a four-second gap, we hear the voice of Herbert
Paine in section 2. He relates being caught up in the commotion, and he speaks
animatedly of dodging the police, pinpointing the action as being on 129th
Reich’s Sound Collage for the Harlem Six 149

Street. Paine recounts how the youths are hit around the face, with one of them
fighting back against a police officer, resulting in two of the cops teaming up
to beat that youth. Following a momentary blip in the tape, we hear in sec-
tion 3 the voice of an unnamed businessman. Although he has witnessed these
injustices, he affirms the right of the police to enforce the rule of law. Walking
through a block in the area near the fruit stall, he sees the police attacking the
youths and, fearful that it could have been him, accentuates the need for humor
and sensitivity in patrolling the area. Like Herbert Paine before him, he refers
to police brutality in beating the youths around the head and causing bloody
injuries.
Frank Stafford is central to Reich’s diegesis, providing a dominant and de-
fining voice among the witnesses to injustice in Harlem’s Six Condemned.
Stafford’s words are underscored by the sound of typewriters clangorously
typing while he speaks, although these do not create as clear a sense of location
as DeLuca’s cash register. Reich allocates him a comparable level of exposure
to Daniel Hamm, and Stafford’s contributions alternate with Hamm’s between
sections 6 and 11. Stafford’s words comprise five of the twenty-nine sections of
the collage—6, 8, 10, 13, and 17—a far greater degree of prominence than he
receives in The Torture of Mothers. Reich does not name Stafford, however, and
we are dependent on Nelson’s description of him as “an American prototype,
thirty-one years old, a family man with two kids and a non-working wife, plays
a good game of basketball on Sunday; a salesman, hits the sidewalks of Harlem
with a neat attache [sic] case and a peddlers [sic] license . . . anything to decently
support his family . . . an American prototype, except that he’s black.”31
Stafford speaks of being attacked by three policemen and being hit in the eye.
He is recognized by a passerby who urges him to cooperate with the police as his
eye was clearly in need of emergency treatment. Instead of being taken to a hos-
pital, Stafford is taken to the Twenty-Eighth Precinct police station and abused
further, and he describes how the police continued beating him, smashing
oranges in his already injured face. Labeled as a “cop fighter,” Stafford is fur-
ther punched in the jaw and the chest before being taken to Harlem Hospital,
where Wallace Baker would also be taken, and where Frank Sugar—the owner
of the used clothing store—had a life-saving operation after being stabbed. For
Stafford, it was to be a pointless journey, however, since specialist medical at-
tention was not available there. Subsequently taken to Bellevue Hospital in
Lower Manhattan, Stafford recalls a two-week period during which surgeons
attempted to save his eye but to no avail, rendering necessary a second operation
to remove it. He does not name specific police officers but speaks of an enduring
suspicion of him as he now wears an eyepatch while working as a street seller.
Given his extended period of hospitalization, the taped interview with Stafford
must have been recorded some weeks after the fruit stall riot.
Only two of the six imprisoned boys—Daniel Hamm and Wallace Baker—
are given voice in Harlem’s Six Condemned. Whereas Wallace Baker is allotted
150 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

only one section, Reich demonstrates a veritable fascination with Hamm’s voice,
which is heard seven times, interspersed as a kind of intermittent vocal rondo
between sections 4 and 29. As with Reich’s treatment of Frank Stafford, Hamm’s
prominence here stands in contrast to Nelson’s book, paving the way for using his
words as the basis for Come Out. In the source recordings, Hamm speaks with a
quiet, measured, and somewhat melodic voice that stands out from the rest of the
speakers on the sound collage. When combined with the story about the bruise
blood, we gain at this point a sense of a fairly calm, rational individual, rather
than that of an impassioned subject producing a “human outcry”32 that one might
ostensibly hear as the piece develops and increases in intensity. Indeed, there is
something lulling, even meditative, about Hamm’s restrained persona and its re-
alization in his speech, which stands in great contrast, for example, to Brother
Walter’s. Whether the result of the musicality of the young man’s voice or com-
passion for his plight in having to injure himself further in order to be allowed
to go to the hospital, Reich gives heightened agency to Hamm, appointing him
spokesman for the six youths in Harlem’s Six Condemned.
We also learn a great deal about Hamm’s situation. He lives about a mile
from the scene of the fruit stall riot—and describes himself as unemployed, but
seeking employment with the assistance of a nearby adult education center. In a
previous generation, Hamm might have been a candidate for employment with
the Pullman Company, with its policy of employing African American men
as porters, but Hamm is no latter-day Lawrence Davies.33 In section 4, Hamm
describes hearing a police siren, seeing a police officer waving his billy club
and brandishing a gun at some children, and becoming caught up himself in
the events. The police tackle him, and he is taken handcuffed to the patrol car,
with his friend Wallace Baker. Sections 7 and 9 progress the narrative and relate
events at the Twenty-Eighth Precinct police station, where they are handcuffed
and systematically beaten by gangs of up to twelve police officers. After some
four hours of merciless beatings, Hamm recalls—in section 11—the police’s de-
cision to take boys who were bleeding to the hospital. Since Hamm was not
bleeding, he opened up a large bruise on his leg where he had been beaten. The
phrase describing these actions—“I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some
of the bruise blood come out to show them that I was bleeding”—receives cen-
tral prominence and appears near the midpoint of the collage, between 12:26
and 12:31. This central positioning reinforces further the significance of Hamm’s
voice in defining Reich’s relationship with the Harlem Six.
This is followed in section 16 by an analepsis as Hamm returns to the de-
scription of events at the police station, recounting the police becoming weary
with beating the boys, spitting at them, and even walking over them. Hamm’s
words bring the collage to a conclusion in section 29. He claims that the police
wish to rid the area of African American youths in the careful preparation of the
city’s image for the New York World’s Fair, which opened on April 22, 1964, just
five days after the fruit stall riot and a week before the murder of Mrs. Sugar. His
Reich’s Sound Collage for the Harlem Six 151

words speak for all African Americans in Harlem: the fair’s success depends on
black citizens undertaking menial, “penny-ante” jobs as a means of making their
presence in the city more palatable. And his emphatic “and that’s it” brings the
collage uncompromisingly to an end. Wallace Baker—the only other member
of the Harlem Six to be given a voice—adds little to the narrative through his
single contribution in section 5, although his vocal pitch is distinctly lower than
Hamm’s and therefore provides some timbral contrast.
The voices of all six mothers are heard in the collage. Despite Wallace Baker
receiving scant exposure, his mother is the first to appear, her story beginning
in section 12 with her being called to Harlem Hospital to sign a consent form
for Wallace’s X-ray. She recalls Wallace’s neck being jolted to one side, his being
unable to walk, and his wearing a patch over one eye, just as Frank Stafford
needed to do after losing an eye. She describes the indignity of seeing her son,
bloodstains on his trousers, crying as she enters, knowing that the police had
extracted a confession from him for killing Mrs. Sugar.
Mrs. Baker introduces Lieutenant Satriano in the narrative, whom she has
read about in the newspaper because of a corruption case against him. Leading
a horde of some thirty policemen, Satriano enters her house without a search
warrant, apparently looking for a coat stolen from the Sugars’ clothing store. She
describes in graphic, quasi-dramatic terms the invasive search by the detectives
as they snatch the bedclothes, her young grandchildren thrown crudely on top
of each other, and her own indignity as Satriano refuses to leave the room while
she gets dressed to go to the precinct. She is seemingly in conversation with
Daniel Hamm’s mother in section 15, although closer examination reveals the
tapes to have been merely juxtaposed, with no actual exchange between them.
Mary Hamm—mother of Danny (as she refers to him)—is a prominent voice
in Nelson’s book but is overshadowed in Reich’s sound collage by her son’s contri-
bution. Starting in section 15, she appears to be in conversation with Mrs. Baker,
a genuine duologue rather than the splicing together of two voices to create a
semblance of conversation. She speaks of her incredulity that a policeman could
have beaten her son but stoically asserts that the law is always right and the
African American is always in the wrong. Mrs. Hamm describes her experience
of the police visiting her house and taking Danny for questioning as part of their
rounding up of the boys after the clothing shop murder.
In Reich’s hands, Mrs. Hamm’s story moves quickly to the police crowding
on the roof to arrest the boys and take them to the precinct. In section 27, her
final contribution to Reich’s narrative, she speaks of not wanting her son to be
represented by a Legal Aid lawyer, having seen how unsatisfactorily this has
worked out for the son of one of her friends. She speaks also of the lawyers’
attempts to confuse the boys to get them to confess to the murder, her refer-
ence to their fast talking presaging Reich’s subsequent treatment of Daniel’s
voice in Come Out, where Hamm’s rational speech gives way to phased
incomprehensibility.
152 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

In section 19, Walter Thomas’s mother, Mildred, speaks of how the detectives
raided her house, searching for the coat stolen from the clothing shop, grabbing
Walter and trying to handcuff him. Initially assuming this to be the boisterous
behavior of Walter’s friends, the realization of what is taking place only dawns
on her when ten or eleven detectives try to arrest her son. Once again Lieutenant
Satriano is at the center of the investigation, focusing on an old coat that Mrs.
Thomas intended to throw out, which is assumed by the police to have been
stolen from the used clothing store. On behalf of the mothers, Mrs. Thomas
makes contact with Bill Epton, the African American head of the Harlem
Defense Council. Epton was also a central figure in the Progressive Labor Party,
based at 336 Lennox Avenue, New York, close to the events of the fruit stall riot.
Nelson’s prose shows a particular sensitivity toward Mrs. Craig,34 but in
Reich’s hands her voice is heard only near the end of the collage, where she
describes visiting her son Willie and having to talk to him through a telephone
link because he was being held in a cage. His only reported request to his mother
is for her to get him a lawyer, a request that becomes the raison d’être for the
benefit, and is therefore a significant way that the collage magnifies our under-
standing of Come Out. Mrs. Rice’s voice is also heard only once, where she takes
up the theme of wanting an independent lawyer to represent her son. Nelson
describes Mrs. Rice and her husband as being “a little more prosperous than
the others,”35 but her husband’s encounter with Judge Calkins serves only to
quash the family’s aspirations of independence as Calkins attempts to impose
on them lawyers of the court’s choosing. Nelson’s commentary points to the ad-
ditional difficulty that Rice had “implicated himself on the tape, saying openly
that during the riot he had picked up a garbage can to defend himself.”36
There are several ways in which Harlem’s Six Condemned sheds new light on
our understanding of Come Out. First, it confirms a shared political context and
content for both pieces, and Reich’s political association through Nelson with
those seeking to challenge injustice. Although contemporary accounts of the
benefit make no mention of Reich’s contribution to the evening, it aligned his
work with the aims and aspirations of a loosely associated group of people at the
forefront of civil rights in New York, just as he had been previously associated
with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. In both cases, however, Reich’s working
style seems to have contained a strong element of independence, perhaps re-
flecting a mindset of producing music for, rather than creating performance with.
Second, analysis of the sound collage creates a sonic context through the
granularity of the individual voices, the distributed sense of placefulness it
establishes, and the materiality of its sonic dimensions, which collectively allow
the participants to exist as complex, rounded characters, capable of agency and
intervention. Come Out then attempts to function as a microcosm by taking a
single voice and loading it with meanings that cannot easily be fathomed out-
side of this context, so that we might develop an appreciation of who Daniel
Hamm is, where he lives, his daytime occupation, and his relationships with his
friends and with his mother (his father is not mentioned).
Reich’s Sound Collage for the Harlem Six 153

While some of this could be garnered from reading The Torture of Mothers,
the sound collage gives us a unique insight into Hamm’s emotional world, and
of those around him, reflecting Reich’s view that “speech melodies are windows
into people’s souls,”37 the conviction that there is an inseparable link between the
music innate in a person’s speech and the personality of the speaker. Harlem’s Six
Condemned presents a rich tapestry of speech melodies, providing context and
depth to Hamm’s voice, which is then extracted to form in Come Out an extended
musical portrait of his personal identity. The decision to focus the entire die-
gesis through a single character has resonance in Jewish narrative: just as through
Abraham, the promise is given that all generations shall be blessed, Reich treats
Hamm as a focal point for the suffering and injustice of African Americans.
Third, the sound collage establishes Reich’s function as auteur-like, a role he
had already developed in his three previous uses of sound-collage technique. In
realizing the scenario given to him by Nelson,38 Reich shapes and refines mate-
rial so that his own voice is heard through the voices of others. On one level this
is also true of Reich’s approach in Come Out, as has been recognized by Siarhei
Biareishyk:

Whereas Hamm’s voice is directly audible in the utterance, the work also
entails the latent voice of the composer—a voice embedded in the structure
of the piece, inaudible but nonetheless present in the compositional choices of
the author in manipulations of Hamm’s statement.39
In Harlem’s Six Condemned, Reich’s editing magnifies the racial distinction
between himself and the voices he presents, emphasizing the function of
“whiteness” as he arranges the voices of thirteen African Americans, and in
so doing presents a patriarchal chronicle in which the three narrative strands
move from older men, to the youths and to their mothers. The Torture of
Mothers gives a voice to the women whose sons were suffering injustice.
Reich’s storyline mediates the story through the voices of men as much as
women, a narrative gap reflected in its title, which focuses on the fate of the
Harlem Six “condemned” rather than the tortured anguish of their mothers.
This notwithstanding, however, each of the mothers is given a voice by
Reich,40 whereas the voices of Wallace Baker and (especially) Daniel Hamm
are loaded with the responsibility for representing the plight of the entire
Harlem Six.
Fourth, the sound collage challenges Reich’s assessment of the success of
the benefit—and by implication his music—was that it achieved its stated aim
because in the fullness of time there was a retrial for the Harlem Six.41 While
serving to add a quasi-fairy-tale ending to the case, this is something of an over-
estimation, not least because it ignores the extended period of time before the
youths were released. It was not until 1967 that the appeal led by Conrad Lynn
came to court, and while it was successful in achieving a retrial, the outcome was
that two of the six were found guilty and immediately began lengthy custodial
154 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

sentences, with the other four not being retried until 1971. It was not until the
summer of 1974 that Daniel Hamm—Reich’s principal protagonist—was freed
from prison.
Reich’s retelling treats the benefit at Town Hall as an isolated event, but in
August 1967 a much larger event was staged at the Village Theater in Lower
Manhattan, which attracted an audience of two thousand people. On this oc-
casion, Ossie Davis acted as MC with music provided by singer Richie Havens.
James Baldwin delivered an impassioned speech demanding—in support of the
Harlem Six—an economic boycott, focused on persuading African Americans
not to buy cars from General Motors. The event had a broader scope in its civil
rights aspirations than the Harlem Six, however, and in addition raised money
for civil rights work in South Carolina.
Reich has tended to underplay his personal commitment to the cause of the
Harlem Six, which went far beyond the benefit. His lack of public comment has
been interpreted as a lack of interest in the case, and the release of a commer-
cial recording of Come Out might have suggested that Reich’s only interest was
personal advancement.42 But the composer’s correspondence with Conrad Lynn
during 1967 reveals the extent to which he went to ensure that Daniel Hamm
received a fair payment from the royalties he received for his voice being used in
the CBS recording, with Reich negotiating an additional one-off fee for Hamm
as a “performer.” Hamm wrote to Reich in 1968 to express his gratitude to Reich
for his actions.43
This close reading of the source materials calls for a rethinking of Come Out,
which takes into account the threefold relationship between the benefit concert
and its aims in achieving justice for the Harlem Six, the shaping of the narrative
in The Torture of Mothers and Reich’s subsequent recasting of the story in his
sound collage, and the layers of meaning that these create. The initial appeal of
Come Out, the first of Reich’s pieces to be commercially recorded, was its intro-
duction of phasing as an experimental technique. From the vantage point of the
early twenty-first century, Reich’s use of phasing as a compositional method can
now be understood as a relatively small component in the composer’s output,
while his ongoing work with creating music from speech material, especially
that of male African Americans, spans his entire oeuvre. The importance of
Come Out thus lies in establishing a broader context in which to understand the
emerging significance of Reich’s speech-based music.

Notes

1. Reich 2002b, 22.

2. Strickland 1993, 190.
3. Gopinath 2005, 200.
Reich’s Sound Collage for the Harlem Six 155

4. The source recording for the work, archived at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, SSR
[SR CD-3 Track 5], is entitled Harlem’s Six Condemned, and the title is used in that
format throughout this chapter. The spine of the original tape box also carries this
designation, although the front of the box has the format “Harlem’s Condemned 6.”
Both inscriptions are in Reich’s handwriting.
5. Duckworth 1999, 297.
6. Zuckerman 2002. In conversation with Edward Strickland, Reich
stated clearly that “Come Out is a civil rights piece.” Strickland 1993, 40. Reich’s
conversations with Dean Suzuki, however, suggest that Reich believed any political
content of the work to be secondary to the musical content. Suzuki 1991, 461.
7. Potter 2000, 177–79.
8. M. Morris 2004, 62–64. The phrase “bruise blood” has since been adopted
by choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh as the title for her 2009 dance piece that uses
Come Out as its soundtrack, and which conveys physically the emotion of the words
through angular and anguished movement. See Mackrell 2009.
9. Whitesell 2001, 177.
10. Gopinath 2009, 135.
11. Gopinath 2005, 195.
12. This date is proposed by William Duckworth (1995, 299), although in an
unpublished interview of July 18, 1994, with K.  Robert Schwarz, Reich puts the
move a month later to October 1965. Irrespective of the exact date, Reich’s return
to New York was approximately eighteen months after the events that had led to the
imprisonment of the Harlem Six.
13. Extracts from Nelson’s The Old Man: John Brown at Harper’s Ferry (1973)
and his other main writings are reproduced in Schafer 1989.
14. Grimes in Reich 1987a.
15. It is conceivable that Reich saw the role of tape editor as somehow dissimilar
to his previous work in creating sound collages, although the only significant differ-
ence would seem to be that Nelson, rather than Reich, created the dramatic scenario.
16. Cole 2012, 324.
17. Gopinath (2005, 194–233) has explored in detail the possible relationships
between the political and Come Out.
18. Schwarz 1992, 13. See also Ryan Ebright’s discussion of this issue in his
chapter in this volume.
19. See also Strickland 1991, 40; Zuckerman 2002.
20. Nelson (1968, 88) indicates that various means of raising money (and aware-
ness) were adopted, with the mothers themselves collecting on the streets of Harlem
to pay for lawyers of their choosing.
21. See The Militant 1966, 4. The inside page of the program for the event also
contained a statement from novelist, playwright, and social critic James Baldwin
(1924–87).
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
156 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

24. Scott Saul points to the syncretic African/African-diasporic music in We

Insist! Freedom Now, which resonates with Reich’s quasi-African musical elements
in Come Out. Saul 2009, 93–96.
25. This account is assembled from a range of sources. Gopinath (2005, 215–18)
provides a fulsome account of the details of the case. While acknowledging the sig-
nificance of Nelson’s The Torture of Mothers, Gopinath’s account also draws exten-
sively on a variety of newspaper reports and four other main sources: Baldwin 1966;
Kunstler 1994, 172–74; Lynn 1979, 3–33; and Rubinstein 1968, 21–25. Additional
details have since been published in Boyd 2008, 87–101.
26. Nelson links this police station with jailhouse beatings of African Americans
dating back to the 1930s. Nelson 1968, 18.
27. Gopinath emphasizes the racial tensions between Harlem’s established
Jews and Italians, whom he describes as having “assumed the mantle of whiteness”
(2005, 210), and the more recently arrived African American communities. He also
makes reference to the surfacing of such tensions in the first trial as a result of the
Jewish heritage of the judge, the victim, and five members of the jury.
28. References in this chapter are to the Beacon Press edition, published in
1968. The publisher’s note to this edition traces the book’s faltering steps to publi-
cation from its production in autumn 1964, some six months after the events that
it narrates. Because of difficulties in finding a publisher, Nelson initially published
The Torture of Mothers privately through his own Garrison Press. Following the
benefit concert at Town Hall, selections of the book were published in the July 1966
issue of Ramparts magazine, coinciding with James Baldwin’s seminal article in the
Nation (Baldwin 1966). An abridged version was also published in Schafer 1989,
230–38.
29. Gopinath 2005, 225–26.
30. With the exception of four lines in The Torture of Mothers, DeLuca’s voice is
absent from Nelson’s original account, but without this reference, it would be impos-
sible to identify him in Reich’s piece.
31. Nelson 1968, 4.
32. Potter 2000, 178.
33. Lawrence “Happy” Davies is the African American Pullman porter subse-
quently recorded by Reich in a 1986 interview for Different Trains. The Pullman
Company had a policy of exclusively employing African American men.
34. Nelson 1968, 30.
35. Ibid., 85.
36. Ibid., 26.
37. Reich 2002b, 178.
38. See Grimes in Reich 1987a.
39. Biareishyk 2012, 75.
40. The difficulties in identifying two of the sections make it impossible to say
with complete certainty whether Mrs. Chancy, Ronald Felder’s aunt, is actually
presented.
41. Zuckerman 2002. Strickland (1993, 40) also notes Reich’s stated belief that
Come Out was a political piece, and his satisfaction that the event led to the retrial of
the Harlem Six.
Reich’s Sound Collage for the Harlem Six 157

42. Gopinath 2005, 202.

43. It is unclear how this relates to concert performances, of which the piece
received many. In the May 1966 Park Place Gallery concert program, Come Out to
Show Them (4/66)—as it was still called—is described as being “composed as part
of a dramatization of Truman Nelson’s book, The Torture of Mothers, which was
presented at Town Hall in April of 1966 as a benefit for the retrial—with lawyers of
their own choosing—of the six boys arrested for murder during the Harlem ‘Fruit
Stand Riots’ of 1964. The voice is that of Daniel Hamm, 19, one of the six now serving
a life sentence. He is describing a beating he took in the Harlem 28th precinct. The
police were about to take the boys to Harlem Hospital to get them ‘cleaned up’ and
were only taking those that were visibly bleeding. Since Hamm had no actual open
bleeding he proceeded to squeeze open a bruise on his leg so that he would be taken
to the hospital. ‘I had to like open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood
come out to show them.’ ” By the time of a performance at Fairleigh-Dickinson
University in January 1967, the concert program contained a note on Come Out (4/
66)—as it was known by then—whose precise description recurs in programs for
several years: “Composed as part of a benefit, presented at Town Hall, for the re-
trial, with lawyers of their own choosing, of the six boys arrested for murder during
the Harlem riots of 1964. The voice is that of Daniel Hamm, then 19, describing a
beating he took in the Harlem 28th precinct. The police were about to take the boys
out to be ‘cleaned up’ and were only taking those who were visibly bleeding. Since
Hamm had no actual open bleeding he proceeded to squeeze open a bruise on his
leg so that he would be taken to the hospital: ‘I had to like open the bruise up and
let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.’ ” By this stage, all references to
Truman Nelson and The Torture of Mothers had been removed.
7

From World War II to the “War on Terror”

An Examination of Steve Reich’s “Docu-Music”
Approach in WTC 9/11

Celia Casey

The events of 9/111 were so devastating and traumatic that—over the years since
then—various art forms have struggled to respond sensitively and appropriately
to them.2 A  number of important composers became caught up in the polit-
ically sensitive aftermath because their views (and even musical styles) were
considered contentious. Karlheinz Stockhausen found himself at the center of a
firestorm of controversy when he labeled the attacks “the greatest artwork in the
cosmos”;3 Pierre Boulez’s passport was seized during a dawn raid on his hotel
room in Switzerland because of a comment he had made decades earlier about
blowing up opera houses;4 and John Adams’s opera The Death of Klinghoffer was
dragged into the limelight ten years after its premiere because of its perceived
sympathy for PLO terrorists.5
In such a volatile situation, many composers approached the topic with cau-
tion. Adams, for example, was “sort of horrified by the idea because the wounds
were very raw and people were at that point almost overdosed on [the] imagery,”6
while anxiety manifested itself in uncertainty for Michael Gordon (“by using this
subject am I forcing the audience to be sympathetic to my work before even a
note of music is played?”)7 and John Corigliano (“how could I instruct the audi-
ence to ignore their own memories?”).8 Even Steve Reich—a composer well cre-
dentialed in creating works about significant issues—delayed responding to 9/
11 for nine years,9 this despite receiving high praise for his previous responses to
traumatic issues. For example, according to Richard Taruskin, Reich’s Different
Trains (1988) is “the only adequate musical response—one of the few adequate
artistic responses in any medium—to the Holocaust.”10
In the wake of 9/11, artistic responses tended to avoid expressing overly
personal perspectives,11 reflecting the view held by abstract painter and writer
Laurie Fendrich, who asserted
We need, I think, to achieve intellectual control of our feelings, and direct our
actions according to what is right and just, instead of to what pleases us as
“personal expression” or intrigues us as convoluted theory.12

159
160 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

There was also a trend towards straightforward expression, for example in liter-
ature, whereby
aesthetics were apparently subordinated to communicative function and “di-
rect” expression. . . . Grief seemed to instill a desire to communicate “directly”
and to disdain “artificial figures, elegant verse, complex explanations, and
Latinate language.”13
Authenticity was another issue, as expressed by Marc Aronson, who perceived
a desire for dealing with reality, describing “a sense that we need to reckon with
the real, not the imaginary; the tragedy, not the fantasy.”14
Reich understood the desire for impersonality, directness, and authenticity
post-9/11:

The only way to deal with events like this, in my view . . . is to go to the docu-
mentary sources that participated in that event . . . and the tone of voice, the
speech melody, contains within it the true intensity of the event, not a dramati-
zation thereof, not a fantasy thereof, but a retelling of a witness.15

His response, WTC 9/11 (2010) is composed for string quartet and features
prerecorded speech and sounds from or related to the attacks. The first move-
ment, “9/11,” is based on public domain recordings from North American
Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the New  York City Fire
Department (FDNY) recorded on the day of the attacks.16 The second move-
ment, “2010,” centers around excerpts from interviews Reich conducted with
friends and former neighbors in Lower Manhattan, as well as an FDNY officer
and three members of Hatzalah, a Jewish volunteer emergency medical service.
The final movement, “WTC,” reflects on the aftermath of 9/11 and the lives lost,
and includes excerpts from interviews Reich conducted with a rabbi, a Jewish
cantor, and a woman who sat with the bodies (or parts of bodies) of victims,
singing psalms until their burial. The melodies and rhythms of the recorded
documentary material generate the musical material that is performed by the
string quartets (one live string quartet plays against two prerecorded string
quartets and prerecorded voices and sounds).17 The quartet provides an accom-
paniment to the recorded speech, framing it as music and enhancing the per-
ception of the musical qualities in the spoken intonation.
Reich popularized this documentary approach with his response to the
Holocaust in the much earlier Different Trains, which Cathy Lane described as
“docu-music”—a term that will be used throughout this chapter in reference to
WTC 9/11.18 The docu-music approach for Different Trains is summarized by
the composer in an early sketch dated December 18, 1987: “It is a must to choose
the documentary materials first. Their pitches & rhythms will then determine
the string music.”19 At the time of its release, Reich claimed that Different Trains
“[began] a new way of composing” as a work that would “accurately reflect the
From World War II to the “War on Terror” 161

whole situation” and which “[presented] both a documentary and a musical re-
ality.”20 A little over a decade later, Reich elaborated on this documentary ap-
proach in an interview with Rebecca Kim:
To consider using the Holocaust as subject material in any way, shape, or form
is so inherently . . . not just difficult, but impossible. What makes this piece
work is that it contains the voices of these people recounting what happened to
them, and I am simply transcribing their speech melody and composing from
that musical starting point. The documentary nature of the piece is essential to
what it is.21
For Reich, the speech melody of individuals heard in Different Trains “is the
unpremeditated organic expression of the events they lived through.”22 Such
thinking led him to see docu-music as the most appropriate way to respond
not only to the Holocaust and to 9/11, but to other sensitive topics like the
Israel-Palestine conflict in The Cave (1993), the Hindenburg disaster in Three
Tales (2002), and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in City Life (1995). He
describes the approach in terms of detachment:
My way of dealing with these things is to stay as close as possible to the docu-
mentary reality. If Different Trains or The Cave or Three Tales or City Life have
any validity, it’s because I’ve been able to stay with that reality without turning
it into some sentimental, maudlin fantasy. That’s exactly what I'm trying to
do with the voices of the NORAD traffic controllers, the New York City Fire
Department and my friends and neighbors who went through this. By taking
that matter-of-fact attitude, one actually preserves the emotion perhaps by
understating it a bit.23
The emphasis on personal detachment in Reich’s docu-music works can
be traced back to his early, process-based compositions. K.  Robert Schwarz
relates his use of “objective” processes to an impersonal basis for composition,
one that is “closely connected to the subjugation of [the composer’s] individual
expression.”24
Commentary around WTC 9/11 has emphasized similar ideas by focusing on
the objectivity of Reich’s docu-music approach, for example Jesse Gephart writes
that “the piece has no slant, it has no bias, it does nothing but elicit from you
an emotional response. It’s almost like you’re back there, on that day, reliving
the ordeal all over again.”25 Despite the desire for objectivity and impersonality
projected on composers responding to 9/11, Martin Scherzinger raises concerns
about this ideal. Drawing on Freud, he states:
The belief in direct speech, authentic expression, unfettered creativity, and so
on, strikes us as naïve today . . . [the] internal process of selecting, organizing,
and assigning value to artistic material constitutes a field of aesthetic and po-
litical judgments without which there can be no artwork.26
162 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

This chapter will examine a selection of primary materials held at the Paul
Sacher Stiftung (PSS), including recorded interviews, computer files, and hand-
written sketches, in order to uncover aspects of the creative process for WTC
9/11. Three elements will receive particular focus: first, an imagistic approach
to the “grain” of sound recordings; second, directorial shaping of the narrative;
and finally, structural and referential elements. Sound recordings are used not
only as musical material and fodder for Reich’s original techniques but also to
evoke the experience of the event, in a way comparable to the iconic images of
the burning towers. Reich’s role as director is investigated in his input during
the interview process. His structural approach is examined as time-altering
treatments of source material from J.S. Bach. An investigation of these traits not
only contributes to our understanding of Reich’s docu-music approach but also
provides important insights into the creative process of such a pivotal composer
of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

The Grain of the Voice

Aspects of the first movement of WTC 9/11 are foreshadowed in Reich’s early
tape works. Mitchell Morris’s observations about Come Out (1966) as a response
to violence are particularly relevant in several ways, such that one may see WTC
9/11 as a late fulfillment of compositional trajectories initiated some forty-four
years earlier; first, in the embrace of specific details in the grain of the voice and
recordings and, second, in the use of temporal distortion.
“I’m not against grain and funk,” Reich once affirmed. “I’m an old 35-mm
film buff!”27 The opening of WTC 9/11 launches directly into an assault of
noisy, grainy recordings with a level of “dirt” unprecedented in Reich’s work.
The strings’ insistent, anxious, pulsing rhythm is taken directly from a re-
cording of a phone’s busy signal, evoking the composer’s experience of being in
contact with his son, Ezra, who, along with his wife and daughter, was residing
in Reich’s apartment on the morning of the attacks, four blocks from the World
Trade Towers.28 As Reich was not in the city during the attacks he relied on the
phone to ensure his family remained safe, and feared its disconnection—“It
was a pretty wrenching experience . . . Basically I told him ‘don’t hang up.’ ”29
This intensified the phone sound’s meaning for him, and he experimented
in the sketching stage with interview excerpts relating to phone calls. In the
opening of the work, the phone’s sound quality becomes the focus, each rep-
etition stripping back referential meaning to allow a more direct emotional
experience. Speech recordings follow, with increasingly distorted timbres, their
words often obscured. There is a focus on the actuality of the recordings, the
authenticity of the artifacts. Juan Suárez writes about a similar dissolving in
Come Out, of “sense into noise and the voice into sheer grain,” resonating with
From World War II to the “War on Terror” 163

Roland Barthes’s well-known essay “The Grain of the Voice,” which appeared
some years after Come Out.30 For Morris, “such specificity is also clearly neces-
sary to the aesthetic or ethical trajectory of Come Out. It matters a lot that we
are listening to Hamm’s voice in all its grainy individuality, with its accent and
idiosyncrasies of pace and pronunciation intact.”31 The selection of grainy and
harsh speech and sound samples for WTC 9/11 was also symbolic; for Reich,
“they are very noisy recordings . . . and that noise is part of the texture of what’s
going on. That noise and confusion is emblematic of the reality of 9/11, for the
people who were in it.”32 Reich has also made a similar comment regarding the
street sounds he recorded for City Life (1995): “You get passing noises and it all
sounds dirty and cheap, but I like the grainy and gritty quality of the sounds.
It’s exactly like New York.”33
Morris’s second observation concerning temporal distortion is significant for
WTC 9/11, given that Reich first conceived the work as “a totally abstract, struc-
tural, musical idea.”34 As he recalls:
I had no idea what the content of that piece would be. The only idea that I did
have was a formal idea, and that was that whoever was talking, whatever they
were talking about, their final syllable would be extended out via software as
a held tone, which could then be doubled by viola, or violin, or the cello, or
what have you. . . . So this idea existed quite independently of any content for
quite some time, and I was really concerned, you know—what am I going to
use for material?35
Reich used digital technology to elongate parts of speech excerpts, as he
describes above, in a technique he terms “stop-action sound.” Reich articulated
both techniques in letters to his patrons Betty Freeman and Judith Stark some
thirty years earlier, in 1980 and 1981, before they were technologically possible
for him.36 While stop-action sound made an appearance in the final movement
of Three Tales, it was brief and, as Reich explains: “There is so much going on,
you don’t really hear it clearly. In WTC 9/11 it’s front and center. It’s the texture,
the connective tissue between one section and the next.”37
Retrospectively, Reich realized that stop-action sound not only provided
structural cohesion but was also symbolically appropriate in the post-9/11 con-
text: “You start building up these textures of what the memories—or the vapor
trails, if you like—of what people had said,”38 and “you begin building up chords
of meaning, if you like, and connecting one speaker to another harmonically.”39
Stop-action sound could also be seen as an appropriate signifier for the trauma
surrounding 9/11.40 In his analysis of Come Out, Morris connects the temporal
distortions of the piece with the temporal distortions experienced by those who
are involved in traumatic situations, writing that “many people who have expe-
rienced serious violence . . . report significant temporal distortions. Time speeds
up, slows down, or seems to recur.”41
164 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

Using stop-action sound enabled Reich to exert aesthetic control over re-
corded speech and sounds through suspending tones at certain places of his
choosing and extending these so that they form part of the continuing har-
monic fabric. It also allowed for the disguise of graphic documentary mate-
rial; for example, in the final recording that appears in the first movement,
one recorded excerpt is extremely harrowing in its original form. It was
made famous after being played to jurors in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui
in the United States Supreme Court on April 11, 2006.42 It captures Kevin
Cosgrove’s last words, spoken on his mobile phone as the World Trade
Center South Tower he is in begins to collapse at 9:58 am on September
11, 2001. His call to 911 from the 105th floor ends with the sound of the
tower collapsing and his scream “Oh God! Ah!” Reich edits out “Oh God!”
from this excerpt for the final work, though his sketches include the entire
phrase.43 In the recording of WTC 9/11, this excerpt is not aurally distinct,
having been transformed from a short, cut-off exclamation into a stretched-
out long note through the use of stop-action sound. It is doubled by the
cello of the first quartet, which further masks its identity and conceals its
meaning. The excerpt appears as simply “Ah” on the instrumental score and
is not mentioned in the program notes.

Reich as Director

Several months after establishing the formal basis and technical elements of
WTC 9/11, Reich realized the subject matter of the work:44 “The light bulb
went on and I said, ‘Wait a minute! I have unfinished business’—I never dealt
with 9/11, which was in my own backyard—literally—and concerned my own
family.”45 Because Reich had lived in close proximity to the World Trade Center
for twenty-five years, he had many friends and neighbors who were in New York
at the time of the events and were directly involved, so he decided to interview
a number of them, “to clarify what really happened,” as he wrote in an email to
interviewees.46
Reich interviewed twenty individuals, and the voices of thirteen appear in
the final work.47 The majority of interviewees were asked to recall and reflect
on their experience of 9/11 in semi-structured interviews. This reflection was
evoked by a list of questions that Reich asked,48 which appears in the PSS ar-
chive in the form of a computer file dated May 26, 2010,49 and is replicated in
Table 7.1.
The archival recordings reveal that Reich approached interviews with
a number of precompositional aims related to content and style, which he
achieved through directing.50 Reich frequently requests answers in complete
sentences (since, as he mentions to interviewees, questions were not to be in-
cluded in the work). He also often asks for answers to be repeated for clarity and
From World War II to the “War on Terror” 165

Table 7.1 Steve Reich’s list of interview questions for WTC 9/11 (2010).

Questions for 9/11

• Where were you the morning of September 11th, 2001?

• What was your reaction when you heard or saw the news?
• Were you or anyone you know personally involved?
• It’s more than eight years ago now. Do you still remember it?
• What is your feeling about it now?
• Do you think something like that could ever happen again?
• Is New York City still a target? Why?
• Why do people often fail to identify who attacked us?
• (Who attacked us? Can you name them?)
• About 3000 people died on 9/11. Do you have any religious tradition or personal
thoughts about what happens to us after we die?

Example 7.1 Compositional sketch dated “7/28/10” (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

ease of musical setting. As a result, the source material is extensive, allowing

Reich to be selective, illustrated by a sketchbook annotation of two interviewees
saying the same phrase (Ex. 7.1).
Such priming of the source material also occurred in Different Trains, where
Reich prompted responses to particular phrases and requested repetition to en-
sure clarity, as evidenced in the following exchange with his governess, Virginia
Mitchell.
Reich: I just want to get, like, when we’re talking about it, you mention,
you know, 1939, 1940, so on so forth . . . what do you remember from,
like, ’39?
Mitchell: ’39 was when we went out to California . . .
Reich: Yeah, can you actually say, “in 1939.”51
Preconceived formal ideas seem to have driven content. This is supported by
a journal entry dated February 21, 1988 where Reich writes: “All of Virginia is
sampled. All of Mr. Davis is sampled. If I am needed, I’ll be sampled to fill a par-
ticular need.” Indeed, Reich did record himself saying phrases that were similar
to Mitchell’s speech samples used in the final version of the piece, although he
abandoned the idea of using his voice in the composition soon after.52
166 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

Reich’s directorial input is more explicit for WTC 9/11 in terms of content and
style. For the creation of the third movement, Reich provided nine interviewees
with prepared scriptural readings and psalms. This enabled him not only to dic-
tate the work’s content but also to foster greater stylistic input through a directo-
rial stance. Reich directed interviewees to recite scripts at least three times each,
and provided guidelines and feedback in terms of pace, clarity, intonation, and
pronunciation. The following is an abridged example of this direction:
Interviewee A: When the body is placed in the earth, the soul is free to
find its place.
Reich: Read the “p” in “place” . . .
Interviewee A: . . . “The Book of Remembrance reads itself for everyone’s
hand has signed it.”
Reich: One more time like that; without so much accent on every word.
 . . . 
Interviewee A: Uh . . . the Chofetz Chaim says: “What you have, you have
for a while. What you give away you have forever.”
Reich: Okay, not so dramatic . . .
Interviewee A: Okay.
Reich: More matter-of-fact . . .
Reich even went so far as to ask interviewees to speak with a different accent to
sound more “believable.” The following is another abridged excerpt of an inter-
view with a different interviewee:
Reich: A little bit more from Texas now.
Interviewee B: [Louder and in a Texan accent]: No such thing as too late
to change!! [laughs].
Reich: Try that again!
Interviewee B: [In a Texan accent]: No such thing as too late to change.
Reich: One more time, a little bit slower.
 . . . 
Interviewee B: [Reads more slowly]:  “The book of Remembrance reads
itself for everyone’s hand has signed it.”
Reich: A little bit more toward Texas and see what happens.
Interviewee B: Okay. [In a Texan accent]:  “The book of Remembrance
reads itself for everyone’s hand has signed it.”
Reich: One more time like that.
Interviewee B: Okay. [In a Texan accent]:  “The book of Remembrance
reads itself for everyone’s hand has signed it.”
Reich: . . . it becomes more believable [laughs].
Interviewee B: What?
Reich: It becomes more believable . . .
Interviewee B: Does it?!
From World War II to the “War on Terror” 167

Reich: Yeah!
Interviewee B: When you put the Texas on it?! [laughs].
Reich: Yeah!! [laughs]. Well, it does, because you heard things like that
when you were a kid, so it taps into that.
Reich directs another interviewee to recite a scripted line, what he describes as
“a real Americanism” with a New York accent:
Reich: How about “No such thing” goes a little bit  .  .  .  like, that’s a real
Americanism. . . . In other words, that would go faster and then . . . you
know [laughs]; slow down.
Interviewee A: [In an “American” accent and said more enthusiasti-
cally]: “no such thing as too late to change!”
Reich: [Laughs]. Okay, now bring it to New York City.
[Both laugh]
Interviewee A: [With a New York accent and in a more serious tone of
voice]: “no such thing as too late to change.”53
This type of direction was also present when Reich was creating his earlier docu-
music work, City Life (1995). Primary source recordings for this composition
reveal that Reich asked a street vendor if he was willing to be recorded saying
the phrase “check it out”—“a really typically New York thing to say,” according
to Reich.54 The vendor, who was already spruiking women’s and men’s clothing,
then inserted the phrase insistently and repeatedly throughout his sales pitch,
after receiving some direction from Reich to shorten the way he said it at first.
Reich’s direction in WTC 9/11 also involved establishing and maintaining
a consistent pitch framework for the sung sections that feature in the third
movement of the work through the use of a tuner, remarking to one individual,
for example, “This particular part’s gonna be in the key of C  .  .  .  in case you
just start chanting . . . there’ll be this very quiet . . . [turns on tuner and starts
humming].”55 The use of pitch and time shifting technology in WTC 9/11 also
resulted in fewer tempo and key changes, overcoming a struggle he encountered
when composing Different Trains.56

WTC, World to Come, The Well-Tempered Clavier

While the first two movements of WTC 9/11 portray both the dramatic imme-
diacy and the direct experiences of 9/11, the third movement adopts a more
solemn and contemplative tone both musically and in subject matter, while also
reflecting the composer’s devout Jewish faith. It is centered on the afterlife, with
a focus on the Jewish tradition of Shmira. As Reich explains:
After 9/11, the bodies and parts of bodies were taken to the medical examiner’s
office on the east side of Manhattan. In Jewish tradition, there is an obligation to
168 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

guard the body from the time of death until burial. The practice, called Shmira,
consists of sitting near the body and reciting Psalms or Biblical passages.57
Reich’s friend and former neighbor, composer David Lang, featured in both
the second and third movements, inspired a number of aspects of WTC 9/11.
Lang composed his own response to 9/11, World to Come (2003), which features
the voice and cello playing of Maya Beiser.58 Reich’s WTC 9/11 also features
Beiser (a friend of both composers), who sings parts of Psalms and the Torah
in the third movement. In his interview with Reich for WTC 9/11, Lang reveals
that he noticed the coincidental initials of World Trade Center and “World to
Come,” a common description in Judaism of the afterlife. Lang explains that his
composition is an attempt to express through music what he knows about the
afterlife, although he admits that his knowledge surrounding this topic is still
developing—his statement “I don’t really know what that means” relates to this
discussion and is featured as a speech excerpt in Reich’s composition. Lang’s
discussion about the inspiration behind the title of his composition clearly
influenced Reich, which Reich admitted to Beiser when he interviewed her for
WTC 9/11 and acknowledged in the program notes for the work.59
There is also another meaning behind the initials “WTC”—Lang identifies J. S.
Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier as having a role in his composition. In his inter-
view with Reich, Lang praises Bach for making his religious beliefs fundamental
to the creation of his music and emphasizes the importance of a similar project
for himself.60 The Well-Tempered Clavier also inspired Reich’s WTC 9/11; how-
ever, its significance is only apparent in considering the musical structure of the
third movement. Here, music takes greater precedence than in the previous two
movements. The recorded speech excerpts are more embedded within the musical
fabric; as Reich told Andrew Ford, the “voices are very mixed back behind the
strings, so you have to kind of lean forward to hear what they’re singing, which is
exactly what I wanted.”61 In a compositional sketch dated September 27, 2010 (al-
most five months after his interview with Lang), Reich wrote:
Work out combined harmonies of JSB—WTC 1st Prelude with 2—or 3 chords
stacked on each other as clusters—either just right hand or both. TRY + see
if you can then follow that for all of 3rd movement. . . . Held tones in MAYA’s
reciting of Psalms will be very good with JSB/WTC. Also Cantor Goffin’s62
chanting Exodus 23:20 in C Major. Held tones here very helpful. . . . Speech
samples need to be either: A) By themselves to begin movement B) Follow the
start of just Maya’s reading—3) Be worked into MAYA/GOFFIN/JSB.63
A prior structural decision had been sketched on August 18, 2010:

Find
S-L-O-W PULSE
could be every bar or slower64
From World War II to the “War on Terror” 169

Example 7.2 J. S. Bach, Prelude No. 1 from The Well-Tempered Clavier, mm. 1–5.

Example 7.3 J. S. Bach, Prelude No. 1, The Well-Tempered Clavier, first five chords.

The harmonic design of WTC 9/11 may bear traces of Reich’s initial thought of
combining chords from Bach’s Prelude No.  1 from The Well-Tempered Clavier
(see Ex. 7.2) and slowing them down. The first five chords in the Bach Prelude,
heard before any chromatic notes are introduced, could perhaps have been the
source of Reich’s sonorities. The five chords are shown in Example 7.3 (chords 1
and 4 are identical). The boundaries of each successive sonority in WTC 9/11
appear to be marked by a change in rhythmic density, departing from the pre-
vailing texture of sustained notes in the strings. An ascending figure that opens
the third movement of WTC 9/11 (m. 657; see Ex. 7.4) resembles the ascending
arpeggiation heard in every bar of Bach’s Prelude, while also being drawn from
the speech melody excerpt “the bodies.”
The arpeggiation figure acts as a signal to the beginning of a section, and with
it a new chord. Basing a section on a single chord is a long-standing practice
in Reich’s music, notably in Music for 18 Musicians (1976), where sections are
introduced by rhythmic changes in the vibraphone part. Each new section in
the third movement of WTC 9/11, based on a new chord, similarly commences
with a rhythmic interjection, which can be seen to suggest a progression on to
the next chord in the manner of Bach’s prelude, but in a stretched-out manner.
170 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

Example 7.4 Opening of WTC 9/11 (string reduction).

This stretching-out procedure is familiar in Reich’s style, as seen most clearly in

Four Organs (1970) and clearly articulated in Slow Motion Sound (1967) and in
his stop-action sound technique discussed earlier. The sonorities demarcated by
rhythmic activity (and marked by a rehearsal number) begin at measures 657,
685, 728, 810, 833, 867, and 902.
Sonorities are built up slowly, one pitch at a time, reminiscent of the gradual
note-to-note shifts between long-sustained chords in Reich’s Variations for
Winds, Strings and Keyboards (1979). Bearing in mind Reich’s stated inten-
tion to build chords with combinations of harmonies from Bach’s prelude, the
first sonority can be interpreted as combining Bach’s second and third chords
(revoiced) (see Ex. 7.5).
Similar constructions are found in the sonorities of measures 810–32, 833–
66, and 867–901, which use the first three chords of Bach’s prelude. Such an
interpretation cannot be conclusive, since all seven diatonic pitch classes are
present, making many different interpretations possible; however, the sonorities
are grouped in sequence, suggesting that Reich’s sketch plan of creating clusters
from combinations of two or three of Bach’s chord has been incorporated,
though in a somewhat veiled manner (see Ex. 7.6, 7.7, and 7.8).
The other sonorities use “stacked fifths,” a stylistic feature of many of Reich’s
works since Eight Lines (1979), particularly prominent in Tehillim (1981), which

Example 7.5 Harmonic reduction of mm. 657–84.

Example 7.6 Harmonic reduction of mm. 810–32.

From World War II to the “War on Terror” 171

Example 7.7 Harmonic reduction of mm. 833–66.

Example 7.8 Harmonic reduction of mm. 867–901.

Example 7.9 Harmonic reduction of mm. 685–727.

Example 7.10 Harmonic reduction of measures 728–809.

can be traced back to a song Reich wrote in 1957, citing the influence of Béla
Bartók in the opening of the second movement of his Second Piano Concerto
(1931)65 (see Ex. 7.9 and 7.10).
This ambiguous merging of several triads has the result of suspending time,
converting sequential sonorities into a static, frozen “now” that (as with the
slow-motion and stop-action sound techniques) is extended, suggesting the
timelessness of the afterlife, and thereby reflecting structurally the “World to
Come” in a way that recalls Lang’s comments, in addition to being a fitting de-
piction of the time distortions involved in traumatic experiences.66
Reich’s homage to Bach is not only one of personal adulation (in Reich’s
view Bach is “the greatest composer who ever lived in the West”),67 but could
be seen as something transcendent, similar to how works by “past masters” such
as Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler are used at times of crisis and upheaval, as
discussed by Adams.68
172 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

Conclusion

The perception of Reich’s docu-music as detached and objective—and thereby

eminently suitable in responding to trauma—is challenged by closer examina-
tion of his creative processes, which resonates with leading documentary film-
maker John Grierson’s description of the medium as “the creative treatment of
actuality”69 or Richard MacCann’s description as “something more special than
straight reporting, something unique and rather wonderful—factual, yet artis-
tically arranged.”70
Scrutiny of sketch materials indicates that WTC 9/11 is a far more personal
and constructed response than its docu-music approach may lead us to believe,
with several preconceived ideas at play in its creative evolution. The high level of
authorial influence (or even “intervention”) reveals an artist at work, searching
for an authentic, personal response to trauma, and utilizing musical techniques
inherent to his style.
Autobiographical elements emerge in Reich’s speech-based works throughout
his career. The dark mood of It’s Gonna Rain (1965) reflected his pessimism fol-
lowing a difficult divorce and during a time of nuclear threat, soon after the
Cuban Missile Crisis.71 Different Trains (1988) is based in Reich’s childhood ex-
perience of traveling on trains between New York and Los Angeles to be with
one or the other of his divorced parents, at a time when other Jewish children,
in Europe, were on trains to Nazi camps. City Life (1995) is the composer’s fare-
well memento to New York City and a way for him to recollect the sounds he
had heard daily while living there for thirty years. His move to Vermont was
prompted by frustration with increasing noise and pollution, reflected in the
third movement’s title “It Has been a Honeymoon—Can’t Take No Mo’,” and the
work evokes the sense of impending danger that Reich experienced following
the first major terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.
WTC 9/11 keeps with this tendency by exploring aspects inherently
personal to the composer. It is not surprising to find a composer per-
sonally involved in his subject, especially one so close to home. Reich
comments:  “Certainly I  wouldn’t have written WTC 9/11 if I  hadn’t been
involved in it personally.  .  .  . [It] was a very powerful experience, not just
something I  watched on television but something that intruded right into
my personal family life.”72 Reich’s autobiographical approach to the creative
process reflects his experience: “This was not some media event for me . . . it
was a terrifying personal experience that I will never forget. . . . [It] impacted
me directly. You’re being tapped on the shoulder and told, ‘Hey man, this is
yours. This is your part of the story.’ ”73
During interviews he conducted for the work, the composer sometimes
interjected with personal reflections on his experiences of 9/11, as in the
following:
From World War II to the “War on Terror” 173

I lived during the war—I saw these photos, you know; Cologne, Dresden; and
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and then I went down there to see it . . . and I actually
saw it. . . . I just, I broke down, because it all . . . I mean, now it’s in my backyard
and I didn’t want to go back down there again.74
Reich’s approach to WTC 9/11 has resulted in a work that has the potential
to evoke strong emotions for listeners, especially for someone who experi-
enced the events such as Rob Haskins, who said, “Never in my wildest imag-
ination could I envision a piece of music that had the capability to resurrect
the sense of fear, dread, and hopelessness that I felt that day. Reich’s new work
does that.”75
WTC 9/11 also promotes a reflection of life beyond 9/11, fulfilling an impor-
tant challenge articulated by Peter Tregear, who writes:
When using art commemoratively the challenge of both artists and critics alike
should be not simply to help us remember epochal events and their impact
upon us, but also to enable the much more difficult task of reflecting critically
both on that past and ourselves.76
It also encouraged Reich to reflect on his own life and beyond. When discussing
the inclusion of part of the Wayfarer’s prayer chanted by the cantor in the third
movement, he has commented: “It’s actually from Exodus. . . . [It] means: ‘Behold,
I send an angel before you, to keep you, on the way, and to bring you, to the place
that I have prepared’ and I hope somebody says that when I’m in that position.”77
Reich’s outlook is optimistic: “I believe there is a World to Come and I have no
more idea about it than David Lang does but I hope I get there.”78

Notes

1. 9/11 refers to the four coordinated terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda in the United
States of America on September 11, 2001.
2. For example, British composer Tansy Davies said of her opera Between
Worlds (2015), “I don’t think it could have been done earlier.” Quoted in
Maddocks 2015.
3. This comment resulted in the cancellation of scheduled performances of
Stockhausen’s works, including a performance of Stimmung by Ossia, a music group
run by students at the Eastman School of Music. Scherzinger 2007, 96.
4. Wroe 2008.
5. Palestinian Liberation Organization terrorists hijacked the cruise ship
Achille Lauro and killed Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer in 1985. See Bohn 2004.
6. DePont 2011.
7. Gordon 2007.
8. Corigliano 2010.
174 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

9. Reich did, however, mention a “work in progress” as early as 2002

(Midgette 2002).
10. Taruskin 2008.
11. Fisher and Flota 2011, 4.
12. Fendrich, quoted in Fujimura 2001, 72.
13. Alkalay-Gut 2005, 257–58.
14. Aronson 2003, 28.
15. Petridis 2011, 10:53–11:55.
16. The public domain recordings obtained from NORAD reveal the
drama that unfolded when it was realized that American Airlines Flight 11
(the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center) was not on course.
These recordings are available online: https://archive.org/details/NORAD-
U SN O RT HC OM _ 0 9 _ 1 1 _ 0 1 _ Tap e s _ g ov e r n m e nt at t i c . or g _ R e l e a s e d _
Apr_9_2008/NORAD-USNORTHCOM_09_11_01_Tapes_governmentattic.
org_Released_Apr_9_2008/DRM1_DAT2_Channel_2_MCC_Op.mp3.
17. Both Different Trains and WTC 9/11 were composed for the Kronos Quartet.
18. Lane 2006, 9.
19. Reich n.d.b. The music for Different Trains is based on excerpts of the re-
corded testimony of five individuals, including Holocaust survivors and figures rel-
evant to Reich’s personal experience. Reich 1989.
20. Steve Reich, “Different Trains,” liner notes for Different Trains/Electric
Counterpoint compact disc (Nonesuch 79176-2, 1989).
21. Kim 2000.
22. Quoted in Reich 2002b, 198–99.
23. Currin 2011.
24. Schwarz 1980–81, 379.
25. Gephart 2011.
26. Scherzinger 2007, 93.
27. Davidson 1999.
28. Moehlis 2012.
29. Day 2011.
30. For a discussion of the connection see Suárez 2008, 82.
31. M. Morris 2004, 61–62.
32. Moehlis 2012.
33. Tingen 1995, 12.
34. Tsioulcas 2011.
35. Reich 2010.
36. Reich n.d.a.
37. Moehlis 2012.
38. Tsioulcas 2011.
39. Reich 2013b.
40. Adams also included temporal distortions in his response to 9/11, On the
Transmigration of Souls (2001), describing “a kind of density of texture that I wanted
to capture in the music, but in an almost freeze-frame slow motion.” Adams 2002.
From World War II to the “War on Terror” 175

41. M. Morris 2004, 63.

42. See Stout and Lewis 2006.
43. The original speech excerpt was saved with the title “My G-d Ahhh.”
Reich n.d.b.
44. Reich 2013b.
45. Reich 2011b, 0:41–0:53.
46. Reich n.d.b.
47. Interviews were conducted from January 18 to October 6, 2010. Reich n.d.b.
48. Reich mostly adhered to this list of questions, although he sometimes
deviated to related questions, for example: “Did you know anybody who was in the
Trade Center?” He also prepared additional lists of questions for specific individuals.
Reich n.d.b.
49. Reich n.d.b.
50. Brown and Dillon 2012.
51. Reich n.d.b.
52. Reich n.d.b.
53. No excerpts were used from this interview excerpt, they are included here to
illustrate Reich’s interview process. Reich n.d.b.
54. Reich n.d.b.
55. Reich n.d.b. Reich’s choice of C major for the third movement is explained
in the following section of this chapter.
56. In a journal for Different Trains, Reich wrote: “The REAL PROBLEM is put-
ting together more than one speech sample and getting it into notation!!!” (February
2, 1988. Reich n.d.b.). He also remarked in an interview that “People don’t speak in
a fixed tempo or key . . . so every section of Different Trains is in a different key or a
different tempo.” Riefe 2013.
57. Reich 2013b.
58. Reich also composed Cello Counterpoint (2003) for Beiser.
59. Reich n.d.b.; Reich 2011b.
60. Reich n.d.b.
61. A. Ford 2012, 8:33–8:48.
62. Reich recorded a cantor from the Lincoln Square Synagogue, Sherwood
Goffin, who chanted part of the Wayfarer’s prayer from Exodus. Reich 2013b.
63. Reich n.d.b.
64. Ibid.
65. Potter 2000, 156.
66. M. Morris 2004, 63.
67. Strickland 1991, 36.
68. Adams 2009, 262.
69. Grierson 1966, 13.
70. MacCann 1973, 11.
71. Strickland 1991, 190.
72. Day 2011.
73. Berger 2011; Currin 2011.
176 Repetition, Speech, and Identity

74. Reich n.d.b.

75. Haskins 2011, 155.
76. Tregear 2007, 168.
77. A. Ford 2012, 8:08–8:32.
78. Ibid., 10:29–10:36.
PART III
REICH REVISITED

Sketch Studies
8

“Save as . . . »”
Hybrid Resources in the Steve Reich Collection

Matthias Kassel

Ever since the Paul Sacher Stiftung (PSS) acquired the Steve Reich Collection
in 2008, it has numbered among the foundation’s most frequently consulted
holdings.* The main reason for this is, of course, the fame of Reich himself, whose
works have been performed successfully the world over for some five decades
and are widely available on sound recordings. Compared with the widespread
popularity of Reich’s music, however, musicologists have tended to stand aloof
from it, owing first of all to an academic mentality focused mainly on historical
progress, but also on the subject itself and the state of the sources. True, studies
of Reich’s music already began to appear early in his career, but seldom were the
authors able to penetrate deeply into the substance of his pieces, for Reich gen-
erally avoided detailed explanations not specifically related to performances or
central compositional ideas. At times his published statements, being rarely sub-
ject to verification against the sources, were elevated to the level of axioms with a
tendency toward mythification, thereby doing a disservice both to scholars and
to the subject itself.
Some of the chapters in this volume reveal just how far and across such
wide areas the level of research has risen since the PSS opened its Steve Reich
Collection. Several of the authors pursued their studies on the basis of original
sources preserved in the Sacher archive, and in every case it transpires that the
structural, harmonic, and thematic intricacies underlying Reich’s artistic ideas
are far more complex than his purportedly “minimalistic” music would seem
to imply.
In this chapter, I begin with some thoughts on the PSS’s general collection
policies and proceed to a brief discussion of the structure of the Steve Reich
Collection, thereby providing a context for the source studies in this volume
and information for future research projects. Beginning with the manuscript
holdings, I will discuss two historical layers of material under the catchwords
“hybrid-analog” and “hybrid-digital.” These two generic crossovers lend the

* This chapter was originally written in German and was translated to English by
J. Bradford Robinson.

179
180 Reich Revisited

collection its specific character, in terms of archival practice and media analysis,
and place special demands both on the archive itself and on scholars studying
the sources.

Paper Archive and Context

In its basic philosophy, the PSS was designed to be an archive for the pres-
ervation and study of musical manuscripts related to composed music of
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and it was as such that it opened
in 1986. Its workplaces and shelf space were therefore aligned on the con-
servation and examination of paper sources, inter alia with air-conditioned
storage, an ongoing strategy of photographic reproduction, passive and pro-
active custodial measures such as acid-free wrappers, and, in some cases,
restorative stabilization. As a result, studies tended to focus on manuscript
and sketch analysis, as is reflected in many of the articles published in the
PSS’s annual bulletin.1
Yet the PSS’s holdings are not limited to handwritten working papers. In order
to study synchronic and diachronic contexts and lines of evolution, not only in
the music itself but also in the individual’s ties to institutions and other people,
it is essential to have appropriate contextual documents as well. Often ties of this
sort can only be inferred from correspondence, program leaflets, photographs,
or other supporting material. For this reason, the PSS incorporates all musically
relevant contexts in its collections wherever possible. Moreover, the act of mu-
sical creation has harbored a general tendency toward multimedia expansion.
This tendency, no longer restricted to experimental working methods, has been
reinforced by the widespread distribution and accessibility of technical means
for recording and processing music in the twentieth century. Given the structur-
ally multimedial nature inherent by definition in our modes of composition, per-
formance, and perception,2 even creative musicians with a staunchly traditional
modus operandi will at some point accumulate workshop and performance
materials outside the medium of writing—that is, physical objects that augment
the paper source material. In the case of electronic music, live electronics, or
works created entirely on tape (we need only think of Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain and
Come Out), such media may even stand in lieu of paper sources. However, when
manuscript holdings are expanded with an eye to extratextual and reception-
aesthetic contexts, this adds a completely new dimension—a layer of nonwritten
materials directly related to the genesis and substance of the work in question.
Rather than positing an extrinsic relation between written text and supporting
material, here we must assume that they have equivalent status in an intermedial
context.3 In the following, I will discuss examples of this from the Steve Reich
Collection.
“Save as . . . »” 181

The Steve Reich Papers

In its basic substance, the Steve Reich Collection consists first and foremost
of written material. The very first consignment from the composer, a large
body of materials delivered in 2008, contained handwritten sources for all of
his works completed to date, from Music for Two or More Pianos or Piano and
Tape (1964) to what was then his most recent creation, Double Sextet (2006–7).4
Reich augmented these holdings in two subsequent consignments of 2010 and
2013, extending the material available for study to the string quartet WTC 9/11,
completed in 2011. The manuscript section of the collection made it possible to
carry out textual investigations of Reich’s music in the same way as with every
other collection in the archive.5 As a rule, this material is classified by work in
dossiers combining sketches, drafts, fair copies, annotated copies, and printed
scores for every piece concerned. One peculiarity of the Steve Reich Collection
is the large number of sketchbooks that he compiled continuously from the
1960s. Their significance for the genesis of his works and their underlying ideas,
and thus for analytical research, cannot be overstated. There are now fifty such
sketchbooks in the archive (Reich himself calls them “note books”) containing
notes, sketches, and drafts for the pieces he was currently working on, as well as
discarded material and rough ideas, transcriptions and pattern studies, verbal
notes, and much else besides. Despite his turn toward computer-aided working
methods, Reich still sets down many of his important ideas in writing, so that
his sketchbooks also contain basic information on his most recent pieces. It is
here that any study of his music must begin.

Hybrid-Analog: Paper Plus Tape

Ever since the tape pieces It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966), Reich’s
oeuvre has contained compositions for, or with, magnetic tape. As a result, his
collection also includes nonwritten archival documents that provide informa-
tion on the elaboration of these media layers. Here, I am not referring prima-
rily to the audio material that accompanies compositions in the ancillary form
of live recordings of rehearsals or performances. His collection does contain
documents of this sort, which may indeed shed valuable light on a work’s his-
tory. One especially interesting example is the many tapes for his “work in
progress” Music for 18 Musicians (1976), which bear witness to its lengthy ges-
tation with the participating performers.6 The collection also has many live
recordings of performances made since the 1960s, some of which bring to life
key markers in the work’s reception history. However, the magnetic tapes for
his tape compositions, as well as the performance tapes for such pieces as the
Counterpoint series,7 or Different Trains (1988), are far more important. Rather
182 Reich Revisited

than being secondary to the particular work, they constitute an intrinsic com-
ponent, whether as an integral part or as an intermedial addition. In these cases,
analytic studies that ignore cross-media components can only illustrate partial
aspects of the work in question.
Of the several hundred units in the tape archive of the Steve Reich Collection,
special mention should be made of audio materials from the early stages of
his compositions. Examples include several “sketch tapes” that functioned as
storage tools in Reich’s studio. We also find source recordings, sometimes quite
extensive, that gave rise to the material for the documentary layer of Different
Trains, as well as various “work tapes” for The Cave (1993) and several other
pieces. Such aural “snapshots” allow us to retrace the acoustical control points
that Reich inserted during the act of composition and to examine them as pre-
liminary stages en route to the work’s final form. The parallels to working with
handwritten sketches and drafts are obvious and stand out sharply in Reich’s
working methods, allowing us to speak of interlinked source materials with
a “hybrid-analog” media approach. Here “hybrid” refers to the fact that the
media components always relate to the written sources. The sound documents
preceding the compositional process and the control recordings accompanying
the act of creation are all manifest in the written material, for example, in the
form of transcriptions or later revisions of the musical text. The term “analog”
refers here to the fact that the material is rooted in the outdated area of analog
media and must consequently be stored and assessed with their particular tech-
nical requirements in mind. This applies to audio material dating well into the
1990s, before digital technology finally spread through all media.8

Hybrid-Digital: Paper, Data, and Back Again

By the mid-1980s, the computer had found its way into Steve Reich’s studio. His
goal, as is well known, was not computer music per se, with its programmed
experiments in synthesizing sounds and scores; rather, from the very outset
he used the computer as a technological aid both in creating scores and parts
and in arranging and assembling audio sources and performance tapes. As far
as archiving and source analysis are concerned, this means that his formerly
analog-written working materials and media expansions increasingly came to
contain digital variants. But it does not mean that pure computer-aided media
analysis is now necessary to make the relevant sources accessible. As with the
hybrid-analog parts of the collection, the switch to computer files did not entail
a complete realignment of his working methods. Instead, again we find media
crossovers, so that for the time being I refer to these sources as “hybrid-digital.”
As musical notation was also digitized, this now affected not only the audio ma-
terial but also the elaboration of Reich’s scores, a task previously done entirely
by hand. Not only that, it need hardly be emphasized that computerization also
“Save as . . . »” 183

affected the contextual areas of the collection—photographs, program leaflets,

working correspondence, and much else besides. Many things now arose in
a digital format from the very beginning (i.e., they were “born digital”) and
reached the archive in this form.
Nevertheless, completely paperless composing remains a great rarity. As a
rule, and as is the case with Reich, hybrid working methods apply to texts: paper
documents such as sketches, working diagrams, overviews, verbal notes, and
draft scores continue to be produced, whether by hand, as a computer printout,
or as a combination of printout and handwritten annotations. Thus, a good many
of the sketches for Different Trains were written down as usual in sketchbooks,
but we also find various computer printouts with handwritten alterations. In ad-
dition, there are various analog-to-digital conversions in the audio expansions
of Different Trains:

1. The original audio material, consisting of interviews and train noises, was
recorded on analog magnetic tape. Snippets of this were digitized and
processed for the composition and the prerecorded tape using a sampling
keyboard and an Apple-Macintosh computer with sequencer software.
2. Analog rewrites of sections from the piece exist on so-called work tapes
from various phases of the computer processing. In other words, Reich
overwrote several control recordings from the sampler setup on his tape
recorder in order to listen to them later.
3. The recording originally intended for performance purposes is in fact
a prerecorded tape, that is, the version composed on the computer was
transferred to analog magnetic tape. Four-track and stereo versions of
such performance tapes are preserved in the collection. Today the pub-
lisher provides a CD recording digitized from these tapes.9

Despite these transitional areas between handwritten music and auxiliary an-
alog or digital medium, conventional analytic studies of Different Trains are still
appropriate. The sketchbooks and the partly annotated computer printouts have
much to say about the work’s gestation, and a comparison with the surviving
tape recordings conveys a vivid picture of the overall conception.10 For a com-
plete study, however, it is essential to consult the computer data, which involves
entering uncharted archival and analytic territory. A brief description of the state
of the sources from the archive’s standpoint will serve to illustrate this point.
Besides handwritten documents, the first consignment of Reich’s papers also
contained several hundred data storage devices (DD and HD diskettes, 44 MB
cartridges, ZIP cartridges, etc.). The initial inspection at the archive revealed
many different ways in which the digital data had rapidly deteriorated:

1. A large number of the diskettes, now fifteen to twenty years old, were al-
ready unreadable and had to be set aside for future technically demanding
and costly salvaging operations.
184 Reich Revisited

2. Most of the diskettes were formatted and written in obsolete operating

systems, such as Mac OS 6 and OS 7 in the case of Different Trains,
necessitating the use of a historic computer.
3. Similarly, the versions of the software programs employed are only partly
operable and are further restricted by active copy protection features to
prevent their reinstallation. Transferring such obsolete files into current
computer systems often requires the use of several intermediate versions,
not all of which are currently available.
4. Should the transferal be successful, the stored file information (dates of
creation and modification, software and hardware versions, etc.) is auto-
matically altered by the new system, making it difficult to localize such
data in the creative process.
5. Furthermore, the sampler Reich used to write some of the HD diskettes
(manufactured by Casio) made use of a proprietary format and lacks re-
liable functionality today, even when given large amounts of time. As a
result, these diskettes, too, cannot be studied without difficulties.
This is only a small sample of the problems still to be solved before the data
material can be completely accessed. In an ideal world, the process should end
with every file completely broken down in a searchable database and with the
metadata captured with maximum accuracy.11 The technical complications
I have just outlined reveal that we still have a long way to go before we reach
this end.
To keep interested scholars from waiting unnecessarily, the digital section
of the Steve Reich Collection was given a purely pragmatic temporary system.
Though sometimes clumsy in its handling of older data, it provides enough
information to answer most of the questions asked. A  technologically up-to-
date workstation is available to study the sequencer and music notation files.
For older works, such as Different Trains, we also employ earlier Mac models
with the OS 9 operating system and operable versions of the software programs
that Reich himself used at the time, thereby making it possible to read many of
the files and to display the original folder hierarchy created from the diskette
images (see Fig. 8.1).12 This historical system, which closely resembles the orig-
inal version’s environment, allows us to open and examine many of the music
and text files for Different Trains and some of Reich’s later compositions. Not
only that, the accessible file information proves to be fairly stable and can be
used in addition to Reich’s own storage system and naming habits to explore the
chronology of his creative work.
At the same time, several wholly novel problems crop up. The first is purely
quantitative: though it is reasonable to expect two or three draft scores or several
performance tape versions to exist for a particular work, the processing of a large
number of file versions quickly turns into a mare’s nest. This is already apparent
in the still relatively manageable body of data for Different Trains. In the screen
“Save as . . . »” 185

Figure 8.1 Steve Reich, Different Trains (1988), screenshot of the folder structure in list
form (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

shot in Figure 8.1, only two of a total of thirteen main folders were expanded.
When the other folders are opened (Fig. 8.2), we are suddenly confronted with
a list of more than 470 objects, bursting the limits of the screen. These objects
must first be classified by format and temporal location before their files can
be examined. In this case, some of them can presumably be compared with ex-
isting paper sources and assigned a place in the work’s genesis. But it is plain to
see that the road to the text-critical verification of these assignments is narrow
and thorny.
Moreover, media classifications of this sort involve a few unusual sources of
errors:
1. It is only at a lower folder level that the dates displayed in columns two and
three refer to Reich’s original dates (1988), whereas the dates of the main
folders refer to the date of the copy operation at the Archive (2012–13).13
Further, it must be assumed that the sequence of times of day is at best rel-
ative: whether they relate to the local time zone in Reich’s original system
(EST) or to that of the system employed at the archive (MEZ) can only be
determined definitively via the resource code of the individual files.
2. Similarly, the program assignments in column five are reliable only with
reservations, as they are dependent on the program versions installed
in the archive’s system. The identification of the Professional Composer
documents is probably correct, as this software program was so specific
and short-lived that misinterpretations of this format are highly unlikely.
In contrast, the assignment of “Different Trains Sequence 1st” in folder
5 (Fig. 8.1, line 8) to Performer 6.02 reveals just such a shift, as version
186 Reich Revisited

Figure 8.2 Steve Reich, Different Trains (1988), screenshot of the folder structure in ex-
panded list form (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

6.02 (1998) was installed in the archive, whereas Reich had presumably
switched to Digital Performer (available from 1990) long before Performer
6.02 was released. True, the version installed in the archive easily reads the
older files, since this software program remained backward-compatible
for an extraordinarily long period of time. But there are bound to be slight
discrepancies in function and display.
3. A  related source of error lurks in the system-dependent assignment of
file formats to standard programs.14 Difficulties result above all in older
Mac data, for in its earlier versions this environment, unlike DOS and
Windows systems, made do without such filename extensions. Instead,
the connection to the software program was written directly into the files’
code. As the program assignment is invariably defined and modifiable
within the system concerned, files may at times be accessed by the wrong
program or by a different version, as illustrated by the preceding example
of Performer files. In many cases this may not pose any problems; after all,
the substance of the file becomes recognizable. But for exact text-critical
“Save as . . . »” 187

access it is important to reconstruct the original environment, though this

is often impossible in practice (we need only think of the time lapse or
the use of little-known special programs). Further, the use of established
exchange formats, such as MIDI control data (.mid) in music notation
and sequencing programs, or digital audio data (.wav, .mp3, etc.), is not
invariably helpful, for the contexts of the original operating system are not
transmitted, severely limiting the text-critical analysis.15

Work in Progress

In many respects, all further processing of the Steve Reich Collection must be
considered a work in progress. First of all, this applies in a biographical sense,
for we have the good fortune to be dealing with documentation compiled during
the composer’s lifetime and can hope to expect many more works from him.
But the material already available in the archive is still being documented, as is
the case with other collections at the PSS. In particular, the manuscripts must
still be completely cataloged for long-term preservation on microfilm. This
custodial desideratum, too, is no longer performed with analog technology but
by using a digital scanning process followed by a printout of the backup films
to produce a complete set of picture files for all the manuscript pages. This will
resolve the previous dilemma, namely, that access to the originals must be lim-
ited for custodial reasons and can be ensured only with the aid of sometimes
unsatisfactory archival reproductions. In future, filmed documents from PSS
collections will be accessible on the computer screen, in color and with all the
scaling and contrast options made possible by digital image display. Hybrid-
digital holdings, such as Steve Reich’s work dossiers since Different Trains, will
benefit from this, for research work can then take place to a large extent on the
screen, so that the digitized manuscripts and their “born digital” counterparts
can be examined in parallel.16
There is no question that the “digital revolution” will continue to spread in
the creation of music.17 An archive traditionally devoted to manuscripts, as is
the PSS, will also have to face this problem if it wants to continue offering ade-
quate research opportunities in the future. Though relatively small sets of digital
holdings had already entered the PSS in several of its collections, the acquisition
of the Steve Reich Collection finally made it imperative to develop a long-term
strategy for archiving digital and hybrid-digital documents. Despite the short
life spans of digital formats, this orientation must be envisioned over a period
of decades, making it essential to evaluate and test the approach with great care.
The archival progress may at times seem sluggish when viewed from the out-
side, but the fault lies solely with the care that must be taken and our obligation
toward future generations. The Steve Reich Collection is a casebook example of
the development and testing of a stable long-term methodology.
188 Reich Revisited

Presumably manuscripts and other paper documents will become rarer in

the future. This is already immediately evident in the work of Reich, who, after
twenty years’ experience with computerized notation and audio editing, now
works much less by hand than ever before, as can be seen in the gradual increase
of digital working documents from his media expansions of The Cave (1993),
Three Tales (2002), and most recently WTC 9/11 (2010). But, as long as there are
compositions for—and performances with—musicians and sheet music (and
I wager that this will continue for some time to come), this area of musical cul-
ture will persist in the hybrid-digital mode. Text criticism in music will follow
suit; indeed, it already does.18 The rest is still up in the air.

Notes

1. The research papers from the Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung can be
found on the PSS’s website: www.paul-sacher-stiftung.ch/en/research-publications/
publications/official-bulletin.html.
2. See, for example, Cook 1998.
3. The various modes of the concept of context are discussed in Danuser 2010,
reprinted in Hinrichsen, Schaper, and Spaltenstein 2014, 104–23.
4. See the announcement of the new Steve Reich Collection in Sacher 2009, 6–8.
5. Hall and Sallis shed light on methods of sketch and manuscript analysis using
examples from various archives. The PSS is discussed there by Mosch with examples
from the Luciano Berio Collection (Mosch 2004, 17–31). See also Sallis 2015.
6. See, for example, Keith Potter’s chapter in this volume.
7. Vermont Counterpoint (1982), New  York Counterpoint (1985), Electric
Counterpoint (1987), and Cello Counterpoint (2003).
8. At present, I use the terms “hybrid-analog” and “hybrid-digital” mediality
or media features on a provisional basis for archiving purposes in order to make
a rough classification of these two major evolutionary stages in musical working
methods. Thus “medium” always refers to the name given to documentary units
in archival practice, i.e., basically to a container or repository of contents to be
described separately. The complete description of an archival medium, whether dig-
ital or analog, falls into several sections and classifies inter alia technical metadata
(type, format, size of repository, etc.), content metadata (authors, title, size, etc.), and
the actual contents as parts of a unit.
9. Published editions of Different Trains for String Quartet and Pre-recorded
Performance Tape: set of parts for Quartet 1 with CD of audio tape (New York: Hendon
Music / Boosey & Hawkes, 1998)  [HL48001582]. Study score with written-out
Quartets 1–4 (New York: Hendon Music / Boosey & Hawkes, 1998) [Hawkes pocket
scores, 1168; HL48002256].
10. See, for example, Zimmermann 2011.
“Save as . . . »” 189

11. The metadata include the type and name of the data medium, the folder
path, the name of the file (i.e., its assignment to a work), the file type, the dates of
creation and modification, and so forth.
12. At present it is still fairly easy to find operable computers from generations
dating back to the 1980s or 1990s, whether from responsible curators who forgot to
dispose of their old equipment, or from international secondhand equipment dealers
on the Internet. Historical software packages with viable versions of music software,
with its often ingenious copy protection mechanisms, are much harder to come by.
What this situation will look like in twenty to thirty years’ time is anybody’s guess.
13. Fortunately, the original dates in the old system environment were not mod-
ified when the data were mirrored. Extreme caution is called for in more recent sys-
tems, for beginning with System 10 (aka Mac OS X), the consistency of the dates is
no longer ensured even within the Mac’s own data mirroring facility.
14. All computer users know this from their own experience. Files indexed with
“.doc” and “.docx” are opened by the word (or, more accurately, text) processor,
“.jpg” or “.tif ” by the picture editor, and so forth.
15. The world still awaits an established standard format for music notation or
sequencing data that will enable files to be exchanged between the various programs.
Promising attempts such as MusicXML are still at the development stage, and it is
questionable whether commercial software providers will take a liking to such open
formats at all.
16. The same distinction applies to documents subsequently digitized in the ar-
chive, whether these be audio, video, or image documents. The decisive factor in
text-critical source evaluation is always the original form of appearance.
17. See Lehmann 2012; Borio 2015.
18. See Feller 2004, 176–88, as well as the chapters by Twila Bakker, Celia Casey,
and John Pymm in this volume.
9

Sketching a New Tonality

A Preliminary Assessment of Steve Reich’s Sketches
for Music for 18 Musicians in Telling the Story of This
Work’s Approach to Tonality

Keith Potter

Introduction

In 2000, I wrote that, from Piano Phase (1967) onward,

the considerable majority of Reich’s compositions would begin with the es-
tablishment of a musical idea with a modal pitch profile. The implications of
this then determine both the structure and the expressive qualities of the sub-
sequent work. With the background and beliefs already described, the char-
acter of Reich’s new modality comes as no surprise. There was at this time,
indeed, he says, “an assumption that was pretty much the case with all of us”
that diatonicism of some kind would form the basis for such music.1
But what exactly was that “diatonicism of some kind?”2 How did Reich himself
conceive it, and how has he then developed his concept and practice of it during
the half-century in which he has since been composing? And what, for the music
analyst, are the most appropriate ways to conceptualize that evolving approach
to harmony, and to use these to find and then deploy analytical methodologies
that will cast new light on how these compositions may best be understood—
and listened to?
It should be added at this point that no comprehensive theory of Reichian
tonal practice could avoid addressing further questions as well. How does the
composer’s harmonic language interact with the rhythmic repetition on which
his approach to minimalism was founded? Does the balance between the im-
portance of rhythm and the importance of pitch as compositional determinants
shift as Reich’s output develops; and, if so, in what kinds of ways and with what
outcomes? No theory of harmony, arguably, can work in a vacuum, especially
one seeking to understand music that, however far it subsequently moved from
its origins, began with an approach that took not pitch structure but rhythmic
repetition as its “sine qua non.”
These are just a few of the many questions that must be answered if a com-
prehensive theory of Reich’s tonal practice is to be achieved. The present chapter

191
192 Reich Revisited

does not aspire to such heights but offers merely some glimpses of the sort
of answers to a few of those questions that can be opened up by study of the
composer’s sketch materials for Music for 18 Musicians of 1974–76. Regarded—
from the time of its first performances and, especially, its initial recording (is-
sued in 1978)3 right up to the present—as Reich’s magnum opus, 18 Musicians
seems the natural work with which to commence a fresh investigation into this
composer’s harmonic language now made possible by access to his extensive
sketches.4

Modality and Tonality, Modes and Chords

Twenty years ago, Jonathan W. Bernard implicated the idiosyncratic nature and
extent of repetition to be found in minimalist music when he warned that
the so-called “return to harmony” or even “return to tonality,” much
remarked upon by critics, is (at least in the case of Reich and Adams) re-
ally an appropriation of harmony for purposes that are essentially new and
not yet at all well understood. To assume that composers, by retrieving such
superficially familiar sonorities as triads and major-minor seventh chords,
have also taken on, whether intending to or not, the hierarchical nature of
common-practice tonality (if not its specific structures) may be assuming far
too much.5
Eight years after issuing this admonition, Bernard identified “four basic stages”6
to “tell the story of what happened after [the] initial establishment of mini-
malism” in the 1960s. First,
(1) Pieces became more complicated, which soon provoked (2) A greater con-
cern with sonority in itself;
As a result of this, Bernard writes, the third and fourth “stages” of minimalist
development ensued; and it is these that now clarify his original caution con-
cerning “the return of tonality”:
(3) pieces began sounding more explicitly “harmonic,” that is, chordally
oriented, though not, at this point, necessarily tonal in any sense. Eventually,
however, (4)  harmony of an ever more tonal (or neotonal, or quasi-tonal)
aspect assumed primary control.  .  .  . [T]he hallmark devices of mini-
malism  .  .  .  were pushed into the background, where they became stylistic
objects.7
So it is clear, on the one hand, that the approach to pitch organization to
be found in works such as Piano Phase—while lending itself to description as
modulating through a sequence emphasizing different pitch centers in turn—is
probably best summed up as “modal,” not “tonal.” This work’s manifest avoidance
Sketching a New Tonality 193

of chordal structures for its harmonic basis, as well as its espousal of melodic
material readily capable of being described in terms of a scale, or “mode,” make
such a conclusion uncontroversial.
On the other hand, it is far less clear that the approach to pitch organization
to be found in, say, Music for 18 Musicians is best summed up as “tonal.” All
published accounts of this work’s pitch structure develop an argument for its
basis in a sequence of chords (taking off from the composer’s own description in
the program notes for its first performances and, in particular, his liner notes to
the work’s first recording).8 Yet in 18 Musicians—and possibly also with Reich’s
later music, for all some works’ stated conceptual basis in chordal structures of
various kinds—I would question whether the apparent umbilical cord between
“tonal” and “chordal” is always meaningful either for the analyst of such music
or for its listeners.
Even if Piano Phase and 18 Musicians are to be regarded as examples of two
quite different stages in Reich’s compositional development, as they commonly
are, both these stages in his output share another fundamental principle behind
his harmonic practice:  that of significant harmonic and tonal ambiguity. The
outcomes of Piano Phase’s straightforwardly mode-derived approach, on the one
hand, and those of 18 Musicians’ more complex integration of modal and chordal
concerns, on the other, may actually be argued as being strikingly different in
certain respects, not least in the potential that the latter work’s more subtle meth-
odology has for building large-scale structures that are varied and satisfying.
However, one thing that both works have in common is an equivocality
concerning harmonies built from the bass upward. Piano Phase sidesteps such
constructions completely by the drastically simple method—common to every
minimalist piece that Reich wrote before Four Organs of 1970—of entirely
avoiding all notes in the bass staff. No other mature work by Reich before Music
for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ of 1973 makes any use of the lower
bass staff at all; in several of his notated, mature compositions written in the
five years or so prior to Four Organs, Reich had used no note lower than middle
C.  The reason lay in his antipathy to the functionality, which Reich thought
inevitable, of the bass in determining and spelling out a tonal center and the
relationships developed around this. In Four Organs, the composer considered
that he had finally found a solution to the problem of handling the lower register
in terms that had, for him, an acceptable level of ambiguity concerning what it
said about the tonality of his music. Essentially, this conclusion revolves around
the decision to treat the bass as the dominant, not the tonic, of his chordal vo-
cabulary, and of the tonal grammar that he then proceeded to erect upon it.
At its most radically reductive, Reich’s music can indeed be argued to ques-
tion the theoretical frameworks previously devised for the kind of pitch vocab-
ulary that he uses; and, similarly, to offer a range of what, in music-semiotic
terms, might be referred to as “aesthesic” interpretations of the deployment of
that pitch vocabulary in surprising contexts. Four Organs demonstrates that a
194 Reich Revisited

triad-based chord in root position—here, in the form of what its composer calls
a “single (dominant 11th) chord”9—can be used, as Ronald Woodley puts it, “to
explore the inherent vertical (and implicitly, in real time, horizontal) tensions
between the ‘tonic-ness’ and ‘dominant-ness’ of its harmonic components.”10
This work’s subjection of such harmonic material to extended repetition for
around fifteen minutes, with all changes effected only very gradually, begins
the process of what Woodley has elsewhere called Reich’s “interrogation of the
Western classical tradition.”11
Such a chordal approach deploying what appears to be a kind of functional
harmony is then taken up again in the pairs of oscillating chords that underpin
Mallet, completed three years after Four Organs. This is the first of Reich’s ma-
ture compositions to engage, in a more obvious manner, with the notion of
chordal progression itself, going beyond both the single basic modality behind
each section of Piano Phase and the slowly changing versions of a single chord
that articulate the unfolding of Four Organs. What Woodley calls the “quasi-
augmentational expansion” of the latter composition is, in Mallet, put to work
in a context more responsive to previous conventions of Western classical to-
nality. Here, the procedure takes its starting point from simple oscillations be-
tween pairs of chords able to function as repeating cadential figures, and even
able to demonstrate a degree of functionality via their bass notes; not all the
chordal vocabulary used, though, can always be easily described in the conven-
tional terms of sevenths, ninths, and so on. The “putative tonal motion”12 thus
generated is then also enhanced by an approach to tonal modulation between
the four sections of Mallet, thus rendering the work as a whole as quite signifi-
cant in Reich’s ongoing reconsideration of “diatonicism of some kind.”
Unsurprisingly, this then becomes one of the models for 18 Musicians, on
which work commenced around one year after the premiere performance of
Mallet in May 1973.13 However, on April 8, 1974, early on in his sketches for 18
Musicians, Reich diagnosed that his “problem is to avoid re-writing Music for
Mallet Inst. V & O again.”14 Clearly intending that his ambitious new concep-
tion, then scarcely begun, must break new ground, he writes that the “Solution”
to this problem “is to concentrate now on new aspects of [the] piece.” These
he identifies as particularly the ones exploring layered textures to produce a
“double layer of augmentation.”

Music for 18 Musicians: New Light on the Nature of Its

Tonality and the Role of the “Cycle of 11 Chords”

How, then, might the groundwork now start to be laid to describe a Reichian
theory of harmony? In 1978, while experimenting with the (then just-released)
LP of Music for 18 Musicians in order “to figure out how the piece worked har-
monically,”15 and to do this entirely from listening,16 the American composer
Sketching a New Tonality 195

and critic Tom Johnson decided that the work “is in a special kind of D major.”
Suggesting that such music, and much else that he here labels the “new tonality,”
“doesn’t have much to do with chord progressions”—though he later clarifies
that he is fully aware of 18 Musicians’ chordal basis, as described in Reich’s pro-
gram notes—Johnson goes on:

Instead, you hear, basically, a scale, and the chords and melodies that arise may
be any combination of notes from this scale. As there is no concern for the
chord progressions that propelled traditional European music and that con-
tinue to propel most pop and folk music as well, there is no need for a strong
bass line to carry the progressions. There is often, if not always, a tonal center,
but this is usually just the note that comes up most often and at the most im-
portant points. It does not have much sense of finality. And when this tonal
center changes or modulates, it is usually just a question of shifting the em-
phasis from one note to another, rather than bringing in a whole new set of
chord progressions, as Beethoven would have done.

Johnson’s thoughtful account of the “new tonality” that he finds in 18

Musicians—which includes a perceptive interpretation of how “Reich shifts the
tonal center frequently and quite craftily” in this work that casts interesting light
on how chordal/scalic, or modal/tonal, distinctions might be said to operate
here—is particularly notable for the way in which it draws attention to the am-
biguity central to this and all of Reich’s other compositions. Such a reaction
can now be used as a springboard to attempt a fuller account of the nature and
function of harmony, and of the nature and role of tonal processes embodied
by that harmony, in 18 Musicians, including as represented by the composer’s
sketchbooks.
Others besides Johnson have previously questioned the nature of 18 Musicians’
tonal grammar, and specifically the degree to which what Bernard called a
“chordally oriented” approach is responsible for how this music unfolds for its
listeners. Yet the “cycle of 11 chords played at the very beginning of the piece
and repeated at the end,”17 using only a key signature of three sharps, on which
Reich stated that the whole work was based, has long passed into the common
currency of the discourse around what has become, for many, the key composi-
tion in Reich’s output. After all, 18 Musicians opens, and closes, with a statement
of the complete sequence of eleven chords, which Reich labels “Pulse” in the final
score, articulated as pulsing chords using both treble and bass notes, and with the
entries of the instruments staggered, each rising to and falling away from forte in
a dynamic arch: what the composer called “the rhythm of the human breath in
the voices and wind instruments . . . gradually washing up like waves against the
constant rhythm of the pianos and mallet instruments”; the resulting crescendi
and diminuendi are one of the work’s most characteristic sounds.
In between these “bookending” statements, sections based on each chord in
turn are unfolded. As the composer puts it, describing the first stage of the main
196 Reich Revisited

portion of the work, “While this pulsing chord is held for about five minutes a
small piece is constructed on it.” This procedure then continues for all eleven
chords, “[stretching] out . . . the basic pulsing harmony” of each one in a manner
that Reich compares to the deployment of a cantus firmus in twelfth-century
organum.
The chord cycle is given, in the form familiar from its publication in several
secondary sources, as Example 9.1. One significant element should be noted
at once about this sketch:  its date. This is the only instance so far found, in
the entire collection of the composer’s sketchbooks, of the basic chord cycle
for 18 Musicians written out in exactly the form in which it has been familiar
from other published sources since 1982.18 Yet Example 9.1 was copied out on
February 1, 1989, around thirteen years after the work on which it is based was
completed and premiered.

Example  9.1 February 1, 1989: untitled sketch for Music for 18 Musicians, recopying
of “cycle of 11 chords,” dated “2/1/89,” Sketchbook  [39], whole page (Steve Reich
Collection, PSS).
Sketching a New Tonality 197

There are, in fact, a few differences between Example 9.1 and the versions
of the cycle of eleven chords already familiar from secondary sources. Besides
occasional variations regarding the details of how these chords are notated—
including their labeling (many published versions use Roman numerals),
the basic note value used, and “stacking” arrangement and beaming—these
differences are confined to changes to their voicing; in no case is there any dif-
ference in the actual pitch classes themselves.19
Why should Reich have returned to this chord sequence following comple-
tion of Different Trains (1988) and just as he was beginning to sketch ideas for
The Cave (1993)? The answer seems to lie in the words on the previous page of
this sketchbook. Trying out some simple melodic and harmonic material (the
chord with notes in the bass staff moving in parallel fifths at the top of Example
9.1, prior to the statement of the 18 Musicians cycle of eleven chords, is another
instance of this), he decides that what he presently needs for his new composi-
tion are “Equanimious [sic] Harmonies that move.”20 In apparent search of these,
he decides to “Look at Music for 18—again.”
As already noted, the composer’s original program and liner notes of 1976–78
underline the significance of thinking in chords, and of harmonic directionality.
We must, though, be careful to note that Reich’s crucial statement here refers
only to the work’s opening “Pulse,” and not to 18 Musicians as a whole: “There
is more harmonic movement in the first five minutes of Music for 18 Musicians
than in any other complete work of mine to this date.”21 We should, in beginning
any attempt to interrogate the role of the cycle of eleven chords in the complete
composition, additionally note the following further quotation from the same
source:
Although the movement from chord to chord is often just a revoicing, inver-
sion, or relative minor or major of a previous chord, usually staying within the
key signature of three sharps at all times, nevertheless, within these limits, har-
monic movement plays a more important role here than in any of my earlier
pieces.
The relatively modest scope of the variety of chord types involved evidently
places self-imposed limitations not only on the chordal vocabulary itself but
also on the extent to which it can generate harmonic motion. Treating the com-
bination of treble and bass as a single entity, it is nevertheless possible to attempt
a brief description at this point of the nature of those chord types and to demon-
strate a degree of tonal progression behind this sequence of chords as a whole.
I have elsewhere described the cycle of eleven chords of 18 Musicians as being
constructed on the principle of “stacked” fourths and fifths already familiar
from Reich’s earlier music and derived, in part, from his enthusiasm for jazz. The
three pitch classes of chord 1’s treble part, for example, are most readily labeled
as D9, piling the notes D, A, and E into a “short stack” of perfect fifths. The two
additional bass pitches, though, seem to ask the question as to whether chord
198 Reich Revisited

1 as a whole is not, in fact, more meaningfully to be regarded as based on B. Its

pitches can be conceptually regarded as continuing the “stacking” of the treble
pitches, extending the sequence of perfect fifths above E with B and F♯. However,
the emphasis on the tonic and dominant of B that the new total of five pitches
also suggests (even though any chord on B would be a second inversion, since
F♯ is the lowest note) allows this aggregate to be arranged in thirds, to give the
label B minor11 (B, D, F♯, A, and E as the highest pitch in this conceptualization,
which lacks the ninth that C♯ would have provided). Second-inversion chords
of various kinds are characteristic (five chords in the cycle of eleven chords can
be so construed). Such tonal evasiveness, measured by conventional kinds of
music theory as derived from Western classical music, is typical of Reich’s ap-
proach, which probably draws its principles, ultimately, more from those to be
found in various areas of jazz. The composer’s frequent recourse to labeling his
harmonic materials modally—Dorian, Phrygian, and so on—doubtless derives,
in significant part, from this source. Though I have not sought to use such labels
as a resource here, this is a subject that would benefit from more research in the
future.22
Thus, even a chord containing only five pitch classes can convey a consider-
able degree of ambiguity, even about its individual identity, never mind its func-
tion in any sequence of chords. All eleven chords in the cycle have only four,
five, or six different pitch classes. Even those with four can yield ambiguities: the
treble pitches of chord 3, for example, the first of these, strongly suggest an A-
based tonality, but the addition of C♯ and F♯ in the bass makes the total aggregate
an F♯ minor7 chord. The chords with six pitch classes (chords 5, 6, and 9) are
capable both of greater ambiguity taken separately and of functioning in quite
subtle and complex ways to help create any tonal context.
“Local” revoicings and inversions—for instance, the way in which the E
appearing only in the upper octave of chord 1’s treble part is then added to the
lower octave of chord 2 as well, both aggregates arguably being eleventh chords
on B (with chord 1 a second inversion and chord 2 a root position)—make clear
how subtle the “motion” from one chord to another can be. If, however, we re-
gard chords 1 and 2 as offering different voicings of a IV chord in F♯ minor, then
we can begin to make sense of the cycle of eleven chords as a whole in terms of
harmonic movement. The B minor of chords 1 and 2 thus leads to the F♯ minor
of chords 3 and 4. Up to this point, the number of pitch classes in each chord has
been either four (chord 3) or five (chords 1, 2, and 4). Chords 5 and 6 increase
the number of pitch classes to six, beginning the ambiguous harmonic move-
ment in the direction of A major (or even the D major heard by Johnson) that
will characterize the remainder of the sequence. F♯ minor is seemingly regained
in chords 7 and 8 (four and five pitch classes, respectively), but another expan-
sion to six pitch classes in chord 9 is the start of a final three-chord tendency
to A major (or, again, even to D major). Since there are no accidentals in any
of these chords (though pitches contradicting the key signature of three sharps
Sketching a New Tonality 199

are occasionally introduced into some sections of 18 Musicians itself, as imme-

diately occurs with the G naturals in the oscillating chords of the middle part
of section I), all eleven chords taken together could be interpreted as being in
F♯ minor. Yet, as we have seen, the potential for a functionality that moves from
F♯ minor (chords 1–4) to A major or D major (chords 5–11) is at least latent in
this sequence.23
When Reich suggested, as quoted previously, that “harmonic movement
plays a more important role here than in any of my earlier pieces,” did he, then,
refer exclusively to the statements of the “Pulse” that frame the main body of
the work? Or did he intend at least to infer that the whole composition was in-
volved? On the one hand, the use of the word “here,” and the context of this
passage in a paragraph beginning with a reference to “the first five minutes” of
18 Musicians, suggest the former. On the other, Reich’s reference, later in this pro-
gram note, to the “opening 11-chord cycle” as “a kind of pulsing cantus for the
entire piece”24 at least raises the issue of how far the “harmonic movement” of the
“Pulse” may be inferred, and even perhaps aurally detected, in the composition
as a whole. Meanwhile, the mention, toward the end of this note, of the “play of
changing harmonic rhythm against constant melodic pattern” as “one of the basic
techniques of this piece” clarifies the importance, for the composer himself, of a
sense of harmony shifting in interesting new ways, even if this passage is clearly
a description of the outcome of placing the kind of oscillating chords already
mentioned, originally devised for Mallet, into fresh contexts with an effect that is
evidently intended to be different from that found in the earlier work.
* * *
Before we can proceed any further with an argument about the nature of har-
mony and tonality in 18 Musicians, we must address the obvious objection to
the kind of harmonic analysis of Example 9.1 indulged in earlier. The pitches in
the treble staff and those in the bass were in fact conceived somewhat separately,
and with a significant degree of independence. This has been known since some
of the earliest commentaries on 18 Musicians: K. Robert Schwarz, for example,
stated in 1982 that the bass line—that is, the sequence of the lowest notes of each
chord, strung together in apparent imitation of the more familiar harmonic
conventions of Western classical music—is in reality “no more than decora-
tive.”25 Nearly twenty years later, the present author—basing my comments on,
among other sources, personal interviews with the composer—suggested that
“the independence of treble and bass, and the greater importance of the former
over the latter, is maintained throughout [the work].”26 It appears, also, that what
began as a “treble-dominated” approach typical of Reich’s earlier manner was
modified only at a subsequent stage of 18 Musicians’ evolution by the sugges-
tion, made by one of the players during initial rehearsals, to add a bass clarinet
to the work’s still-undecided instrumentation, thus causing lower pitches to be
added to the opening “Pulse.”
200 Reich Revisited

Some Further Evidence from Reich’s Sketchbooks concerning

the Evolution of the Cycle of Eleven Chords

The sketchbooks, not available for inspection at the time that either Schwarz or
I was writing, tell this story in much greater detail. These now provide evidence
for some of what could only previously be gleaned from the composer directly
and from perusal of what versions of the score were available at the time.27 They
also now permit a much more nuanced interpretation of the nature and signifi-
cance of Reich’s evolving harmonic language for Music for 18 Musicians, giving
us much more information to be able to assess more rigorously the nature and
significance in this story of the separation of treble and bass pitches to which
reference was made earlier in the chapter. In addition, these sketches may make
it possible to establish the position occupied by oscillating chords derived from
the example of Mallet in an account of the evolution of the cycle of eleven chords
in the later work.
If harmonic motion were indeed to take a significant step forward in Reich’s
practice via the struggle to achieve a new kind of tonal thinking, then the chords
of Example 9.1 might be expected to play the originally determining and overall
controlling role in the evolution of the compositional process as represented by
Reich’s extensive sketches for this work. Extrapolating from this hypothesis, the
first problem that the composer would have to solve might logically be expected
to be the establishment of the details of the harmonic vocabulary appropriate
to the demands of such a new grammar of goal-directed harmonic motion. His
second problem would logically then be to compose out the details of how the
grammar of such a harmonic motion unfold via a chord-by-chord application
of this sequence itself.
However, the early pages of sketches for 18 Musicians provide clear evi-
dence that the starting points for the work were neither specifically chordal nor
more than tangentially about pitch in any way, but predominantly textural and
timbral, and then to some degree rhythmic/metric. No pitch material of any
kind, chordal or melodic, occurs in the initial draft of ideas for the work.28
When, then, does the cycle of eleven chords of Example 9.1 make its first ap-
pearance in Reich’s sketches for 18 Musicians, and what role does it play in the
work’s germination as evidenced by this crucial source? A  reasonable answer
to the first question would read: not until December 15, 1974, when what has
already been described here as the treble pulsing of the final eleven-chord cycle
begins to show itself, in part, via short sequences marked “Piano Pulse” that will
eventually yield the complete sequence. This is, already, around one year after
the very first ideas that might be regarded as contributing to the evolution of 18
Musicians were jotted down.
Any answer to the second question, concerning the role of the cycle of eleven
chords in the evolution of the whole work, can usefully be prefaced by some fur-
ther explanation. Sketchbook evidence of the evolution of harmonic ideas, and
Sketching a New Tonality 201

the extent of any kind of coherent harmonic plan, reveals that two main kinds
of material may be identified characterizing the earlier stages of work in this
area. The first of these consists of pulsing chords or, sometimes, simply pulsing
notes, usually high in the treble staff. The second consists of oscillating chords
(establishing themselves in due course in pairs) that, from the outset, seem
conceived to underpin the pulsing chords, or notes. These oscillating chords
will immediately be familiar, to those who know Reich’s music well, as deriving
from the chordal oscillations in the already mentioned Mallet.
Though two more secondary types of material—what one might best call
interlocking patterns and more clearly melodic material—also feature in
the sketches working up the early ideas for 18 Musicians, pulsing chords
and oscillating chords are the most important generators of harmonic ideas
and, eventually, of tonal planning in the work. The evolving relationship be-
tween them becomes a vital aspect of the story behind the tonal evolution of
18 Musicians. But the question as to whether the dual harmonic “drivers” of
pulsing chords and oscillating chords can be directly mapped onto the sequence
of treble and bass pitches outlined earlier has yet to be answered.
In the sketchbooks, the story behind 18 Musicians’ tonal evolution is a long
one, taking its time, as already suggested, both to clarify the basic constituents
of what only after considerable experimentation cohered as the cycle of eleven
chords and to identify the complete sequence as the work’s main underpinning
structure. In these early sketches, such chordal materials are notable both for the
extent to which they are conceived separately from the cycle of eleven chords
itself and for the extent to which they are identified rhythmically and texturally
as well as in terms of pitch.
Example 9.2 shows Reich on February 20, 1975, working on pulsing chords
for the treble pulsings of the 18 Musicians cycle. The significance of this moment
in the work’s evolution is pointed up by the heading: it is here, after more than
nine months spent on composing 18 Musicians, that Reich makes a decisive at-
tempt toward its eventual title (even the quickly rejected “A New Orchestra” is
quite telling).

Example  9.2 February 20, 1975: “Work in Progress for . . . 18 Musicians,” ten pulsing
chords, treble only, dated “2/20/75,” Sketchbook [15], first two staves only (Steve Reich
Collection, PSS).
202 Reich Revisited

A few examples of comparison between this and the treble line of the cycle of
eleven chords of Example 9.1 show how the cycle itself and the composition as a
whole might have developed from the version of February 20. (Note that, rhyth-
mically, this sketch has in fact already established the continuous eighth-note
pulsing of the final score; Reich makes this clear in his bracketed annotation.) In
chord 3, while moving the lowest treble note from D to E, Example 9.1 reduces
the total number of pitch classes from the opening three (D, E, A) in chords 1
and 2 to just two (E, A): reflected in both section IIIA and IIIB of the final score,
the only instance in which two “small piece[s],”29 as Reich would have called
them, are composed upon the same chord. The 1975 sketch makes the same
move to low E but retains D an octave higher in the “Piano Pulse,” a solution not
followed in the work’s final version.
As the chord sequence unfolds, the main differences between Example 9.1
and Example 9.2 continue to lie in the greater dissonance of the 1975 sketch,
compared with the one of 1989. It will additionally be noted that Example 9.2 has
only ten chords, not eleven. What is missing from the 1975 sketch is not the final
chord of the sequence (E, F♯, A—identical in both versions) but one of the chords
with E as the lowest treble note. While the 1989 sketch, accurately reflecting the
final score, offers four increasingly dissonant chords based on low E, the 1975
sketch has only three. This suggests that the process of increasing dissonance to-
ward the center of the chord sequence—and thus toward the center of the whole
composition as well—was eventually deemed by Reich to require more space to
expand than his 1975 attempt allows: an observation strengthened by noting his
eventual decision to write two “pieces” built on chord 3, as already seen.
Clearly, over the period of some two years during which 18 Musicians was
composed, many different versions of these pulsing chords were tried out, and
some earlier, as well as later, attempts survived into the final score. Just one fur-
ther example of these many versions can be illustrated here. With the partial
performances of 18 Musicians in May 1975 looming,30 the only further sketch
to feature a fuller version of the treble strand of the cycle of eleven chords is the
one dated March 14, 1975, reproduced here as Example 9.3.
This fills out a much fuller texture than did Example 9.2—adding female
voices, violin, cello, and possibly bass clarinet—and, for the first time, supplying
notes in the bass staff to accommodate the additional performers. The basic
structure of the treble pulsing chords continues to be maintained by the two
piano parts; marimbas, voices, and violin articulate other, mostly very closely re-
lated, voicings around this central layer. This, then, seems a significant moment
when decisions about instrumentation, and about how the “Opening Pulse” it-
self will be articulated, are being made, necessitating the addition of notes in the
bass staff to the (by now) already quite well-established pulsing chords in the
treble. A chord sequence with bass notes as well as treble ones is the natural, in-
deed inevitable, outcome of such decisions. Yet that chord sequence—now, with
the full eleven chords, very close to the solution of the score’s complete cycle—is,
Sketching a New Tonality 203

Example 9.3 March 14, 1975: “Opening Pulse—revision & expansion,” dated “March 14,”
Sketchbook [15], (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

in itself, a consequence of textural expansion using a cello and a bass clarinet,

rather than one brought about specifically by prioritizing, during the composi-
tional process, the creation of a complete cycle of eleven chords with bass as well
as treble pitches, on which the whole composition will be built.
In turning the ten-chord sequence of February 20 more closely into the
eleven-chord sequence with which all listeners to 18 Musicians are familiar, we
may note that the sketch of March 14 demonstrates interesting changes of detail.
Example 9.3, for instance, drops pitch class A from the treble staves of chords 5
and 6. In Example 9.2, chord 6 had marked the move of the lowest note of the
treble strand from E to F♯, giving just three treble chords with their lowest note
as E (chords 3–5), rather than the four of the eventual solutions of Examples 9.1
and 9.3. Starting in each case from chord 5, the consecutive dissonances built up
from these lowest notes are thus handled somewhat differently, as Reich shifts
his harmonic thinking here. Example 9.2 moves from a cluster including all the
pitches of the three-sharp key signature between E and B, to a F♯–C♯ cluster in
chords 6 and 7. Then, with the move to low C♯ in chord 8, the cluster is grad-
ually thinned back down to F♯–B; to F♯–A in chord 9 (where the lowest note
is F♯ itself); and, finally, with chord 10’s further shift of lowest note back to E,
dismantled altogether to give E, F♯, and A. It should also be said that, in adding
204 Reich Revisited

an extra chord to Example  9.2, Examples 9.1 and 9.3 only offer a completely
“filled-in” five-pitch cluster at chord 8 (F♯–C♯).
Let us now turn to look briefly at the new bass pitches. The bass notes of
Example 9.3 supply the solutions that Reich will now retain right through the re-
maining year and more before the complete premiere of 18 Musicians (note that
on March 14 he is already considering placing the dyad of the opening chord an
octave lower). Interpretations of some of the possible kinds of harmonic move-
ment discernible in the combination of treble and bass notes that go to make up
the final cycle of eleven chords have already been offered earlier in this chapter.
The pitches in the bass are, of course, crucial to any such interpretations. Bass
notes are also clearly of special significance both for the harmonic construction
of the “wavelike” length-of-a-breath pulsings and for the other ways in which
Reich also articulates harmonies in individual sections of 18 Musicians.
In the opening and concluding “Pulse,” the chords of this cycle feature in ex-
actly the form given in Examples 9.1 and 9.3. Length-of-a-breath pulsing chords
in each individual section of the final score—occurring in every section (in-
cluding both sections IIIA and IIIB)—may be divided into two categories in
terms of their deployment of the treble and bass pitches of the eleven-chord
cycle. Six sections (sections I, IIIA, IIIB, VI, VII, and VIII) use only treble
pitches in pulsing chords lasting a fairly short time (two or at most three pages,
as measured out in the final score; the way in which this material is notated
makes giving measure numbers unhelpful). The other six sections (II, IV, V,
IX, X, and XI) use pitches from both the treble and bass staffs (at nine or ten
pages in the final score, most of these are longer than those in the first category;
though in section V the pulsings run for only six pages, and in section X for only
three—but since the pulsings of this penultimate section run straight on from
those of section IX, this length is, musically speaking, not especially relevant).
In all these cases, the individual chords in the cycle of eleven chords act as a
kind of departure point for similar types of harmony, but with different voicings.
In the main body of the work, the harmonies for these pulsings, and indeed the
other chordally based textures involved, do not always deploy all the pitches of
the chord in question; neither are they always derived from the expected “cor-
rect” chord. To give examples of the deployment of the cycle of eleven chords
in length-of-a-breath pulsing chords from just the first two sections of 18
Musicians: the pulsing chords of section I themselves, played by two clarinets,
merely alternate D–A and A–D dyads extracted from the treble pitches of chord
1, ignoring not only the F♯–B dyad in the bass staff but also the E in the treble.
Meanwhile, the chordal underpinning that supplies the bass pitches—in the
part of the texture performed by voice 3 and the two strings—has by this point
in the section modified the initial F♯–B dyad of chord 1 so far that it can now
alternate chords with G natural and A in the bass.
In the longer exploration of pulsing chords to be found in section II—be-
ginning on a pair of bass clarinets plus violin and cello—the initial bass dyad
Sketching a New Tonality 205

of F♯–B and treble dyad of D–A can be ascribed to chord 2.  But the next
aggregate—a bass dyad of C♯–F♯ and a treble dyad of E–A—may be presumed
to derive from chord 3, not chord 2; though the treble pitches E and A  also
occur in both chords 1 and 2, it is only in chord 3 that the E–A dyad stands
alone in the treble staff. These two initial pairs of dyads then proceed to operate
as merely the first two in a long sequence of such dyads in section II:  some
of them traceable to, for instance, the bass dyads of chords 2, 4, and 5; others
apparently entirely unrelated directly to the cycle of eleven chords. This se-
quence eventually settles on a lengthy oscillation between bass dyads with the
pitches E–B and F♯–D (again, not clearly related to the cycle at all). Throughout
the whole sequence, the dyads in the treble—D–A and E–A (interpretable as
extracted from some combination of the cycle’s chords 1, 2, and 3)—have been
alternating unchanged.
In the final work as a whole, indeed—and now broadening the topic to take
in all the ways in which harmonies are articulated in individual sections of
18 Musicians—Reich takes the harmonies of some sections so far from those
suggested by the chord sequence that an attempt to argue for a tonal scheme
such as the one proposed in my earlier discussion of Example  9.1 might be
argued as making no reasonable sense. To give a single instance of the problems
involved:  I have already suggested that chords 5 and 6 of the final cycle of
eleven chords increase pitch density, and tension, as part of a move away
from F♯ minor, with both the bass line (D to A) and the bass-staff dyads (D–A
succeeded by A–E) of this pair of chords implying that A  major is now the
key involved. In Example 9.3, chords 5 and 6 are exactly the same as those of
Example 9.1, now laid out for Reich’s new ensemble. But in the score itself, we
find more chromatic ideas overlaid around these two chords, even though the
general tendency toward A major is still to some degree retained in the texture
as well.
In section V itself, there is a change of key signature to four sharps and a
fairly strong suggestion of C♯ minor as the tonal center, reinforced by the ini-
tial length-of-a-breath pulsings. This is followed, in the scherzo-like and also to
some extent recapitulatory section VI, by a return to a three-sharp key signature
that “revisit[s] the root-position, F-sharp minor certainties”31 of section IIIA.
The bass dyad, A–E, of chord 6 is present in the relentless alternations of the
lower piano parts here, but only as the third and seventh of an F♯ minor7 chord;
and the cello’s oscillating dyads are grounded on D, as the submediant of F♯, and
remain squarely within three-sharp territory.32

Oscillating Chords

This now leaves us with the other main sides of the tonal story to tell: that of
what I have chosen to call the oscillating chords derived from Music for Mallet
206 Reich Revisited

Instruments, Voices, and Organ; and of what the relationship of these is, if any, to
the cycle of eleven chords, perhaps particularly to the sequence of dyads in the
bass staff that underpins the treble pulsing chords of Examples 9.1 and 9.3. In
Mallet, what Reich calls the “process of augmenting or lengthening the repeating
chord cadences in the women’s voices and organ”33 is already at least putatively
“directional,” to the extent that these chords help to determine the music’s overall
tonal motion, positing an integration of such specifically “harmonic” thinking
into textures that continue to develop around, and are of course also driven
by, a pulse. As Reich puts it, “The first process of rhythmic construction in the
marimbas and glockenspiels has the effect of creating more fast-moving activity,
which then triggers the voices and organ into doubling, quadrupling, and fur-
ther elongating the duration of the notes they sing and play.”
As in Music for 18 Musicians, these processes involved in Mallet interact
upon one another; thus harmonic motion is closely related to the presence of
pulse, and to the articulation and unfolding of a quite strict rhythmic process
familiar from the composer’s more obviously “process-driven” works such as
Drumming (1970–71). Indeed, we have earlier noted that Reich was worried that
18 Musicians would merely “re-write [Mallet].”
Oscillating chords for 18 Musicians arrive even earlier in the sketchbooks
than pulsing chords, with several sequences of them starting on April 14,
1974. As in the final score, and unlike in Mallet, these can sometimes occur in
sequences of more than two chords, though the majority are chordal pairs. The
first to be “composed out” in a manner resembling the way in which oscillating
chords are treated in the final score was sketched on April 28, with further elab-
oration on subsequent dates. This sketch, involving a complete texture of pulse,
oscillating chords, and other material, is given here as Example 9.4.
Despite its notation in four flats—it takes Reich a surprisingly long while
firmly and finally to establish the key signature of three sharps as his overall
tonality—the significance of this B♭ minor7/F minor9 pair of chords for the de-
velopment of 18 Musicians will already be clear from its kinship to the oscillating
chords of this work’s final score. As with several of the latter—including those
articulated by the “paradiddling” of two pianos (the fast alternation of each
pianist’s hands that mimics the rhythmic style of the treble pulsing chords and is
first featured in Reich’s output in Phase Patterns for four electric organs of 1970),
as well as the sustained textures of female voices, violin, and cello, and (just once
each) pairs of clarinets and bass clarinets—the chords in the sketch of April 28
articulate a tonic-dominant relationship using root position harmonies: an ap-
proach quite different from that of the cycle of eleven chords.
The importance of the material first sketched on this occasion is potentially
enhanced by the fact that it is recopied several times in the ensuing months.
These include a sketch of May 2, 1974: seemingly part of the new plan, mentioned
earlier, to use pulsing chords to effect harmonic changes. It is around this point
in the sketches that the first hints are given of how Reich sees the possible link
Sketching a New Tonality 207

Example 9.4 April 28, 1974: untitled sketch for pulse and oscillating chords, dated “4/28,”
Sketchbook [13], whole page (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

between the treble pulsing chords and any more purely sustained harmony
involving bass as well as treble. On May 5—only one day after having written out
quite explicitly, for only the third time, a texture including both treble pulsing
chords and treble-and-bass oscillating chords (plus a melodic figure)—he writes
“pulse + long tones,” simply as confirmation of this idea (without any musical
notation to illustrate it).
208 Reich Revisited

The final score itself encompasses a wide range of approaches to the

oscillating chords in every individual section of the work. These are presented
most often in the form of simple chordal pairs as illustrated in Example 9.4, but
they can, as stated earlier, also be articulated as paradiddling in two of the parts
for piano; sometimes both these types occur in the same section. Length-of-a-
breath pulsings also participate in presenting sequences of chords within indi-
vidual sections, and these tend to be longer than the simple chordal pairs found
elsewhere; sections II, V, IX, and X involve only length-of-a-breath oscillating
chordal material. Voicing and the actual pitch content of these oscillating
chords, too, are more varied and more complex than in Example 9.4, with sev-
eral instances of first- and second-inversion chords and, as we have already seen,
pitches outside the key signature of three sharps.
The first oscillating chords in the sketchbooks to be notated in 18 Musicians’
eventual key signature of three sharps—D (sharp7)/F♯11—occur on May 8, 1974.
Again, these and subsequent examples are used to underpin experiments with
elaborating fuller textures. On December 4, 1974, Reich notates Example 9.5, a
full texture of pulsing chords (a cluster of all five pitch classes from D to A that
does not feature in any other examples illustrated here) and other melodic and
also more purely rhythmic patterns, including a quite elaborate extrapolation of
a sequence of harmonic rhythms for these chords.
This sketch is underpinned by a sequence of seven chords that takes off from
the already much-used B minor7 and F♯ minor9 harmonies and offers various
alternatives to how this sequence will end, including two different options for
concluding on E11. Such a sequence is evidently designed for oscillating use
within a single section; though no part of it appears, at least without significant
alteration, in the final score, several passages could be argued to draw on some
part of this sequence for their underpinning chords. Section IV, for example,
includes length-of-a-breath pulsings in the bass clarinets to provide a crucial
part of the F♯ minor9 harmony of the second chord at the bottom of Example
9.5; while three female voices, violin, and cello offer a more skeletal suggestion
both of this chord and what is really B minor9 (held C♯s are a feature here). Such
connections are, though, dangerously tenuous and suggest that a harmonic out-
line such as that provided by the chords in this sketch perhaps has only a tan-
gential relationship to the final score itself.
Yet the basic oscillation of B minor and F♯ minor, in particular—in a variety
of chord positions and harmonic densities—remains a frequent occurrence in
18 Musicians: right away, in section I, the work’s first oscillating chords outline
B minor in a second inversion and F♯ minor7 in root position. It can also be
said that the general approach to the vocabulary behind the chord building of
Example 9.5—seventh, ninth, and eleventh chords, an emphasis on parallel fifths
in the bass staff—will be familiar to anyone who has looked at the final score.
Curiously—and perhaps merely by accident, since these chords are fairly
clearly designed for oscillating use on a local level—the progression that they
Sketching a New Tonality 209

Example 9.5 December 4, 1974: untitled sketch for a sequence of four-part chords, on page

dated both “12/2” and “12/4,” Sketchbook [14], whole page (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).

outline, in the bass part in particular, bears some resemblance to the overall
tonal shape behind the cycle of eleven chords when their pitches in the bass staff
are supplied, as in Examples 9.1 and 9.3: a broad trajectory from B minor to F♯
(minor) to D major; then, more speculatively, a return to F♯ minor. However, it
seems unlikely that Reich would have consciously sought out and developed
210 Reich Revisited

such a relationship between two such, on the face of it, quite different layers
of his harmonic material in progress; and, of course, such basic tonal “moves,”
involving a plethora of tonic and dominant chords of various kinds, will be part
and parcel of any diatonicism that engages at all with chordal functionality.

Conclusion

So, what have we learned from this brief examination of the composer’s
sketch materials for Music for 18 Musicians about how Steve Reich conceived
the “diatonicism of some kind” to which he evidently remained as committed
in the mid-1970s as he had been in the late 1960s? Clearly, he wished to ex-
tend this diatonicism into fresh territory, at least fresh territory for him: not
least in the quest to find new ways in which to construct a large-scale mu-
sical structure built less overtly than Drumming had been on rhythmic ideas.
What do the composer’s sketchbooks say about the manner in which this
diatonicism evolved to fit, and indeed to shape, the new conditions of 18
Musicians itself? And how might we move forward, as analysts or listeners, to
take account of this new information? It is possible, I think, to say five things
at this stage of research.
First, much, if not all, of the pitch material of 18 Musicians arises out of
compositional concerns that are still based on pulse and rhythmic patterns, on
melodic patterns, on polyphonic layering and unfolding of contrasting types
of material, and on working out how all these might be articulated by a new
and, for Reich, larger-scale ensemble that, for the first time for him, included
instruments of the Western orchestra. At no stage in the sketchbooks covering
the years 1973 to 1976 does the cycle of eleven chords, with bass as well as
treble pitches, occur, with the explicit focus of clarifying a harmonic scheme
for the whole composition. Several attempts can be found in these sketches
to determine the best sequence of pitches in the treble staff for what were,
from the outset, seen as the pulsing chords that would run right through the
work. It is a long time, however, before these treble pulsing chords accumu-
late sufficiently even to begin to articulate any large-scale plan. In addition,
the eventual sketch attempts that also include pitches in the bass staff appear
to function not as sketches for determining the chord sequence itself in a fin-
ished state but as versions of the well-known complete sequence explicitly
“composed out” for use in the form in which it is heard in the work’s opening
and closing stages.
Tonal and harmonic concerns thus did not, as might be inferred from pre-
vious commentary on the work—including the composer’s own—drive the
compositional conception from the outset, giving such matters a pride of place
in Reich’s methodology that they had never possessed before. Rather, they
arose as a consequence of his efforts to devise musical materials for a work
Sketching a New Tonality 211

predicated, above all, on the integration of types of timbrally and texturally

contrasting layers of musical materials that were new to the composer’s output
at this time.
Second, how much does the tonality of 18 Musicians depend on chordal
structures for its conception—and also for its perception, for its listeners? Not
as much as has been generally thought in the past, I would suggest. Oscillating
chords, sometimes of a relatively conventional kind, lie behind individual
sections of the work, and these have an element of functionality to them that
derives in significant part from Reich’s willingness to accept root positions as
well as his often preferred more altered versions of chords, in the sense both
of inversions and of deploying his favored ninth, eleventh, and even thirteenth
chords, as well as sevenths; consecutive parallel voicing, especially with fifths in
the bass, is another departure from “standard practice.”
The individual chords of the cycle of eleven chords, on the other hand,
have rather different roles to play. Thus, my third point is that—as a conse-
quence of the emphasis, during the compositional process itself as revealed by
the composer’s sketchbooks, on other concerns, discussed earlier—the con-
struction of this chord sequence was conceived by Reich much more via its
treble notes than its bass ones. Bass notes were added only later; and compo-
sitionally, the treble pulsing chords seem to continue to have been regarded
by Reich with a considerable degree of independence from the bass. This is
the composer’s attempt to engage in new ways with a significant degree of
ambiguity about what his harmonic materials “spell out,” a characteristic of
all his early minimalist scores, as we have seen. Though, as quoted earlier,
each of these eleven chords is indeed taken as the basis for “a small piece” (in
the case of chord 3, two “small pieces”), Reich is quite free with the way he
handles each chord. A variety of treatments is allowed them; sometimes, espe-
cially with the anyway independently generated oscillating chords, he is quite
cavalier about changing notes, including, as we have already observed, the
introduction of pitches foreign to the prevailing key(s) suggested by the key
signature of three sharps; he even, for one section, changes the key signature
of three sharps itself. And always, of course, he preserves a crucial ambiguity
about what key the music is in, especially with regard to the relative major or
minor of his key signature.
The contrast between Reich’s approach in 18 Musicians and that of Philip Glass
in his exactly contemporaneous Einstein on the Beach (1974–75; premiered, as
was 18 Musicians, in 1976)  is telling. While Glass’s large-scale music-theater
work builds its harmonic foundations on chord progressions underpinned by
functionally moving bass lines, for all the harmonic and other innovations that
Glass’s work employs, Reich’s large-scale “Music For A New Orchestra” (as it was
initially called in Example 9.2) is constructed around a more evasive approach
to its chordal materials. In this approach, bass lines, and indeed all notes in
the bass staff, are treated rather differently, in a manner arguably closer to that
212 Reich Revisited

found in the jazz compositions or improvisations so beloved by the composer in

his younger days, especially when the modal instincts and practices frequently
found in many forms of jazz are involved. It can also now be noted that, to
judge by his sketches for 18 Musicians, Reich continued to be wary of the bass
staff well into the 1970s: page after page of these sketches work with the treble
staff alone. Even when some kind of functionality can be argued for the effects
created by the cycle of eleven chords, the bass pitches of this sequence are, as it
were, insinuated into the harmonic mechanisms that drive the work: sometimes
achieving something beyond K. Robert Schwarz’s already quoted characteriza-
tion of “no more than decorative,” but operating more by stealth than by more
overt kinds of functionality.
As a consequence, listening to 18 Musicians can provoke a wide range of
perceptions about the nature of its tonality. Tom Johnson was surely not very
wide of the mark to suggest, from his listening experience quoted earlier,
that the work “doesn’t have much to do with chord progressions”; nor even—
though the only departure in key signature that the final score makes from
three sharps is to four sharps, not two—to say that it “is in a special kind of
D major.”
Fourth, it would, of course, be wrong to ignore altogether the significance
of the cycle of eleven chords, whether musicologically, analytically, or as a
factor in how we experience the work as listeners. This applies not only in the
opening and closing expositions of the cycle itself in the form that Reich labels
“Pulse,” but also in the way in which we might understand, examine, and enjoy
the gradual unfolding of the fifty or so minutes of music between these two
bookending statements. The treble pulsing chords themselves help to hold 18
Musicians together, and their impact can also be discerned, in particular, in the
length-of-a-breath pulsing chords that permeate this music, as well as via the
melodic and rhythmic materials assembled around the harmonic aggregate of
each of the work’s individual sections. Meanwhile, the oscillating chords anchor
the chordal dimension of 18 Musicians even more firmly—if more locally, in the
sections in which they occur—as an important factor in the work’s appreciation
at all levels.
Fifth, and lastly, Reich’s sketches for 18 Musicians should allow a great many
details about how the work was composed—quite painstakingly over a long pe-
riod of time, as is often the case with him—to inform, and indeed help to shape,
as may be desired, whatever analytical strategy is deemed appropriate for future
work. Here, again, the positive aspects of ambiguity as a tonal and harmonic
stance can be taken on board by the analyst, who is now faced with the complex
and detailed working out of music far from “minimalist,” at least by any limited,
or pejorative, definition of the term. Any analyst must also confront decisions
about whether—and, if so, how—the interface between poietic and aesthesic
“information” will connect to, and affect the outcome of, further musical anal-
ysis of this magnum opus of American minimalism.
Sketching a New Tonality 213

Notes

1. Potter 2000, 188.

2. This description derives directly from interviews with the composer,
conducted by the present author in 1986. As referenced in the main text, it is re-
ferred to in Potter 2000, 188; the quotation at the end of the following paragraph
comes from the same interview source.
3. Steve Reich, Music For 18 Musicians (ECM 1129, 2301 129).
4. Steve Reich’s archival materials, significant in particular for the collection of
sketchbooks they include, were acquired by the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, in 2008.
5. Bernard 1995, 284.
6. Bernard 2003, 114.
7. Ibid.
8. Reich 2002b, 50. All other quotations from the composer that are reprinted
in this volume which come from his own program or liner notes written at the time
of the premiere performance or recording of individual works are simply referenced
to this source.
9. Ibid., 9.
10. This and the quotation in the following paragraph are taken from Woodley
2007, 462.
11. Woodley 1992, 768.
12. Potter 2000, 230.
13. Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ was completed in May 1973
and first performed on May 16 that year by Steve Reich and Musicians at the John
Weber Gallery, New York City.
14. This and the other quotations in this paragraph are taken from a note dated
“April 8” [1974] in Sketchbook [13] (PSS, Basel). All other quotations from the
composer’s sketchbooks will simply be dated—and, where appropriate, located in
greater detail—in this chapter’s main text.
15. All the quotations in this and the following paragraph are taken from Tom
Johnson 1978, also in Tom Johnson 1989, 345–48.
16. Johnson could, at best, have had only a score of sections I–VII of this work
to hand and may not have seen any score at all. Reich began to write out a full score
of 18 Musicians during its composition but completed this only as far as section VII;
this pencil manuscript is now in Basel. For rehearsal and performance purposes,
only instrumental and vocal parts proved necessary. Sections of this incomplete
score did pass into other hands during the early years of the work’s public expo-
sure. But it was not until 1997 that a full score of 18 Musicians—based on the 1978
ECM recording as transcribed by Marc Mellits, under the composer’s supervision—
was initially completed; a version of this was finally published by Boosey & Hawkes
in 2000.
17. All the quotations in this and the following paragraph are taken from Reich
2002b, 87 and 89.
18. The cycle of eleven chords seems to have received its first publication in a
secondary source in Schwarz 1981–82, 247. This notates each chord as an eighth
214 Reich Revisited

note. Later instances include Potter 2000, 234, and Reich 2002b, 89; both these use
whole notes.
19. In Example  9.1, chord 7 lacks the high C♯ to be found in the published
versions; chord 9 lacks high G♯, B, and E; and chord 10 lacks high E. With a single
exception (the G♯ of chord 9, played by the violin and sung, optionally, by voice 1),
these “missing” notes are supplied exclusively by the two marimba parts of the score
itself, as eventually published in 2000.
20. Reich, sketch dated “1/31/89,” Sketchbook [39] (the same source as for
Ex. 9.1).
21. This and the following quotation are taken from Reich 2002b, 87.
22. In addition to the inevitable influence of John Coltrane, and probably Miles
Davis, we might note that the drummer Kenny Clarke has frequently been named
by Reich as an important influence, including specifically in 18 Musicians; while the
impact of a drummer can scarcely be said to be a harmonic one, Clarke worked with
Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and many others who could in some
way be behind the composer’s approach to harmony. Paul Hillier quotes Reich as
saying that “Kenny Clarke produced a buoyant, floating sense of time which I think
you can hear me trying to imitate in the ’70s pieces like Drumming and Music for
18 Musicians” (see his introduction to Reich 2002b, 7). For a further discussion of
the influence of jazz on Reich, see Potter 2000, 158–60. For a further discussion of
Reich’s use of “stacked fifths” in the cycle of eleven chords in 18 Musicians, see Potter
2000, 233–36, and elsewhere in the latter volume for broader commentary on this
harmonic principle. The modal jazz of John Coltrane was probably the most signifi-
cant jazz influence here.
For examples of the application of modal terminology to the analysis of Reich’s
music, see Bennett 1993; Garton 2004. An “altered-dominant” chordal vocabulary
derived in important part from his study of jazz also plays a prominent role in some
of Reich’s later compositions, in particular, as his sketchbooks help to testify. I have
recently explored such chordal vocabulary, with particular reference to Reich’s Triple
Quartet (1999), in Potter 2017, 189–207.
23. For the present author’s fuller discussion of tonality and harmony in 18
Musicians, see Potter 2000, 233–45.
24. These and the following quotations in this paragraph are taken from Reich
2002b, 89, 90.
25. Schwarz 1981–82, 249.
26. Potter 2000, 234; the anecdote about the significance of the bass clarinet in
devising notes in the bass staff for the cycle of eleven chords may also be found on
this page.
27. K. Robert Schwarz probably had a copy of the full score of sections I–VII,
as mentioned earlier. Marc Mellits’s transcription of the complete score (see note
16)  was still in progress while I  was writing most of chapter  3 of Four Musical
Minimalists, and I had access to a prepublished version of this as well.
28. Though the composer writes in his program note for the work that “The first
sketches were made for it in May 1974” (Reich 2002b, 87), the initial reference to the
Sketching a New Tonality 215

work actually occurs in Sketchbook [13] (“November 26, 1973–October 10, 1974”),
dated “12/6,” which indicates December 6, 1973. With the exception of material that
appears to relate to his second period of study of Balinese gamelan music in Seattle
in the summer of 1974, much, if not everything, in the sketchbooks from December
1973 to March 1976 almost certainly involves ideas connected to 18 Musicians. In
addition to the remainder of Sketchbook [13], this covers the whole of Sketchbook
[14] (“October 11, 1974–Feb. 19, 1975”) and Sketchbook [15] (“February 20, 1975–
March 20, 1978”) as far as, probably, March 1976 (the last dated sketch is January 6,
1976, but sketches follow on the three pages after this, and Reich gives “3/76” on the
front of the sketchbook for the completion of material for 18 Musicians).
29. Reich 2002b, 89.
30. The partial premiere of 18 Musicians, performances of sections I–IV, took
place on Tuesday May 20, Wednesday May 21, Friday May 23, and Saturday May 24,
at The Kitchen, New York City. See the entries “Concert – Work in Progress Kitchen”
on these dates in the composer’s “Weekly-Minder” diary for 1975. The world pre-
miere of the complete work took place on Saturday April 24, 1976; the composer’s
1976 diary entry reads “Music for 18 Musicians world premiere—Town Hall.” (These
diaries are also now in Basel.)
31. Potter 2000, 242.
32. For another tonal interpretation of sections V and VI, see Fink 2005b, 52–55.
33. This and the following quotation are taken from Reich 2002b, 76.
10

Improvisation, Two Variations on a

Watermelon, and a New Timeline
for Piano Phase

David Chapman

In his 1974 Writings about Music, Steve Reich dedicated four long paragraphs
and most of two printed pages to the origins of his keyboard duet, Piano Phase.
The first two of these paragraphs suggest a rough timeline for the piece’s cre-
ation that begins “shortly after Melodica” in late May 1966 and ends “early in
1967” with its premiere.1 A summary of the composer’s timeline is provided in
Table 10.1. The latter two paragraphs offer a few brief performance notes and
include an incipit from a handwritten manuscript of the work. Throughout this
passage the composer threaded several claims about what he understood to
be the work’s significance within his creative output. With Piano Phase, Reich
felt that he had successfully achieved his transition from tape composition, in
which he had discovered his signature phase-shifting process, to instrumental
music performed by human beings “without mechanical aid of any kind.” Most
important to the composer—judging from the frequency and emphasis with
which he made the point—Piano Phase was completely worked out ahead of
time and required no score. Reich and Arthur Murphy, one of his closest mu-
sical collaborators at the time, “were not improvising [emphasis in the orig-
inal]” at its premiere.
Reich thus looked back from the publication of Writings about Music in the
mid-1970s and framed the creation of Piano Phase in two ways. First, it initiated
a career-defining series of live-performed works that would soon culminate in
the early drafts and performances of Music for 18 Musicians (1976). Second, it
provided him with an early platform for a thorough repudiation of improvisa-
tion, which had become one of the major themes throughout the Writings about
Music. The Piano Phase origin story survived with no alteration or expansion
in the composer’s reprinted and slightly retitled Writings on Music (2002), and
principal elements of the story could still be observed as recently as 2011, when
Reich recorded a two-minute version for a documentary film about his career.2
His 1974 autobiographical account, moreover, has served as the basis for nearly
all scholarly treatments of the work’s history since the 1970s.3

217
218 Reich Revisited

Table 10.1 Reich’s 1974 timeline for Piano Phase

Date Event

May 22, 1966 Reich composes Melodica

“Shortly after Melodica” Reich considers composing live music
“late in 1966” Reich’s first live-plus-tape experiments for Piano Phase
“In the next few months” Reich’s collaborations with Murphy on Piano Phase
“Early in 1967” The premiere performance of Piano Phase
“later” Piano Phase fully notated

Source: Reich 1974, 51–52.

Reich has never hidden the fact that improvisation had played a very prom-
inent role in his musical career, especially during his San Francisco period in
the early 1960s. He has described the tensions he felt between his strict seri-
alist training at Mills College and the creative freedom of the nearby Jazz
Workshop as “almost a moral dilemma,” finding the work of musicians such as
John Coltrane, Stan Getz, and Bill Evans more fulfilling than that of Schoenberg
and his creative descendants.4 A number of Reich’s pieces from that West Coast
period reflect a desire to find an expressive voice within a jazz-inflected style,
including: Four Pieces (1963), his Mills College thesis composition; Pitch Charts
(1964), written during his first postgraduation year; and Music for Two or More
Pianos or Piano and Tape (hereafter, simply Music for Two or More Pianos) from
1964, which will figure prominently in this chapter. Yet in the early 1970s, Reich
withdrew all his jazz-inspired works from the previous decade and foreclosed
any role for improvisation in the body of work that survived. It was during this
period of self-reassessment that the composer’s origin story for Piano Phase
began to take shape.
During these same years, the relationship between improvisation and the
postwar musical avant-garde seemed especially fraught, often appearing to rep-
resent separate and even competing streams: on one side, John Cage and the
so-called New York School, with their emphasis on compositional openness and
indeterminacy; on the other side, a diverse group of late- or post-jazz experi-
mentalist improvisers, including performance groups such as Musica Elettronica
Viva and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, among
many others.5 This perceived lack of overlap between musical communities
meant that the terms “indeterminacy” and “improvisation” were often treated—
especially among the avant-garde—as mutually exclusive, referring to distinct
and separate practices.
Such was the state of scholarly discourse on the subject in the mid-1990s
when George Lewis identified John Cage’s distaste for jazz as the source of his
own outspoken repudiation of improvisation and his refusal to admit African
Improvisation, Two Variations on a Watermelon 219

American experimental music as a legitimate part of the postwar musical

avant-garde.6 In Lewis’s view, not only should the work of black musicians have
a place within a broader and more inclusive history of experimentalism, but
indeterminacy itself ought to be treated as a form of improvisation. Indeed,
as Benjamin Piekut and others have noted in more recent studies of exper-
imental music from the 1960s and 1970s, improvisation and indeterminacy
often coexisted rather peacefully, if not enthusiastically, within postwar exper-
imentalism.7 This newly mingled and complex history has meant a loosening
of these terminological distinctions, so that features that might once have
been called indeterminate are now treated as improvisational, and vice versa.
However, as Lewis also made clear, despite this terminological slippage, the
decision to call a practice either indeterminate or improvisational can be so-
cially and politically meaningful, with profound implications regarding the
relationships between composers and performers. In the discourse of indeter-
minacy, composers retain their authorial dominion over the many iterations of
their project; in improvisation, composers cede some control to performers.8
As we will soon see, these become central concerns within Reich’s creative phi-
losophy in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Reich’s well-known stylistic and conceptual turn in Piano Phase was at least
in part a return to practices from earlier that decade when indeterminacy and
improvisation characterized his approach to performance. Documents among
the Steve Reich Collection at the Paul Sacher Stiftung (PSS), Basel, compli-
cate the composer’s autobiographical account and challenge several of its key
assertions. These documents—which range from manuscripts and correspond-
ence to archival audio recordings—suggest that neither Reich’s antipathy to-
ward improvisation nor his keyboard duet Piano Phase appeared fully formed
at its premiere in January 1967. That performance did not feature the familiar
B minor–inflected motive shown in Example  10.1a, which has served as the
basis for a number of analyses over the years, but instead featured the har-
monically ambiguous motive shown in Example  10.1b.9 This motive origi-
nally appeared in a manuscript dated December 1966 and was preserved as
the lower piano part in measures 17 through 26 of the final score, eventually
published by Universal Edition in 1980.10 Before settling into the final version
in late 1967 to early 1968, Reich, Murphy, and others performed Piano Phase
in no fewer than three preliminary forms, and it appeared on paper in at least
four different configurations, as shown in Table 10.2. Keith Potter has previ-
ously written that “Piano Phase apparently went through several versions,” and
Dean Suzuki reprinted two of these preliminary manuscripts in his 1991 dis-
sertation, along with the composer’s note that they “are not to be performed.”11
Reich’s multiple versions of Piano Phase were eventually consolidated into the
published version known today. (See Table 10.2 for a current list of the known
preliminary versions of Piano Phase, up to and including its first performance
in its final form.)
220 Reich Revisited

Table  10.2 Preliminary versions of  Piano Phase, up  to its first performance
in its final form
Date Type Notes

Nine modules based on motive in Example 10.1b

December 1966 Ink manuscript Archived in PSS, Basel
Publication Anti-Illusion catalog (1969), p. 29
January 1967a Ink manuscript (measures beamed internally)
Archived in PSS, Basel
January 5, 1967 Performance Fairleigh-Dickinson University
Recording archived in PSS, Basel
Twelve modules based on motive in Example 10.1a
January 1967b Ink manuscript Archived in PSS, Basel
Publication Notations anthology (1969), p. [179]
Corresponding to mm. 1–21 of published version, plus five measures based on
Example 10.1b
January 31, 1967 Performance New York University (“Angry Arts”)
March 17–19, 1967 Performance as “Four Pianos” at Park Place Gallery
Ink manuscript Archived in David Tudor Papers, Getty
Museum, Los Angeles
Corresponding to the version published by Universal Edition in 1980
1967 Ink manuscript Archived in PSS, Basel
January 14, 1968 Performance Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH
Recording archived in PSS, Basel

These many early iterations of Piano Phase testify to an extensive work-in-

progress period and reinforce the composer’s early view of the-work-itself as
something that was independent from any single manuscript or authoritative
recording.12 Until January 1968, when Reich and Murphy first performed the
final and most familiar version at Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire,
Piano Phase had existed as multiple expressions of a single set of animating
ideas. These included, most especially, Reich’s signature phase-shifting process,
wherein two musicians begin to perform a motive in synchrony, then one speeds
up or slows down and moves out of phase with the other until their downbeats
are displaced by precisely one pulse. The process continues as the phasing part
cycles through all possible metric combinations, until the two parts synchronize
their downbeats once again at the end of the process. The paired notion that “the
process is the concept” and “the concept is the work” links Piano Phase and its
composer to the conceptualist and process art movements of the late 1960s, as
has been noted elsewhere.13
Improvisation, Two Variations on a Watermelon 221

The Piano Phase motive achieves its characteristic melody as an emergent

property of two distinct patterns played separately by the two hands.14 In the
familiar B minor version in Example  10.1a, one hand begins by oscillating
between F♯4 and C♯5, while the other hand repeats the ascending three-note
chord, E4–B4–D5. At its premiere Piano Phase featured the brighter, tonally
ambiguous motive of Example 10.1b, an example of what Potter has called the
“stacked-fourth” harmonic idiom that characterized Reich’s music during these
years: E5–B4 in one hand and E4–A4–D5 in the other.15 Indeed, the more fa-
miliar B minor motive stands out as an exception to the composer’s broader
“stacked-fourth” style.
Despite the aural differences between the two motives in Example 10.1, both
require the performer to place one hand directly above the other, typically with
the palm of the right hand nearly resting on the knuckles of the left, fingers
overlapping. To the “stacked fourths” of Reich’s harmonic idiom one might
therefore add the “stacked hands” of his keyboard performance practice. In the
2011 film documentary Phase to Face, Reich demonstrated this disposition of
the pianist’s hands as he relayed his Piano Phase timeline. An artist’s rendering
of this disposition of the hands appears in Figure 10.1.
Other compositions by Reich from the mid-1960s reveal these concepts be-
ginning to form. One such comparison is already commonplace: Reich’s Reed
Phase dates from the same month as the earliest manuscript for Piano Phase

Example  10.1 Two motives for Piano Phase:  (a) the B minor motive as it appears in
mm. 1–2 of Reich 1980c; (b) the “stacked-fourth” motive as it appears in mm. 1–2 of MS
December 1966 (Reich 1969c).

(a)

(b)
222 Reich Revisited

Figure  10.1 Reich demonstrating the “stacked-hand” disposition in Piano Phase

Source: Steve Reich: Phase to Face, dir. Éric Darmon and Frank Mallet, 17:30.

(December 1966), and scholars often refer to these two as a closely related
pair.16 This similarity being well established, then, the present chapter adds to
this stylistic grouping two keyboard ensemble pieces from the mid-1960s that
also suggest significant parallels to—and set important precedents for—Piano
Phase, namely, the aforementioned Music for Two or More Pianos and a largely
extemporaneous and ephemeral piece most often referred to as Improvisations
on a Watermelon. On January 5, 1967, an audience in the Fairleigh-Dickinson
University art gallery in Madison, New Jersey, heard Reich and Murphy per-
form not one but three piano duets, plus three tape works and Jon Gibson’s
performance of Reed Phase, then called Saxophone Phase. The program for that
event appears in Table 10.3.
The order of the presentation that evening, which paired a piano duet with
a tape work in each of its three periods—that is, before, between, and after two
intermissions—implies an even distribution of similar works and invites com-
parison between the three groupings. Both Piano Phase and Two Variations on
a Watermelon (as it was listed in the program) received their first performance
that evening; it was, by contrast, the last known performance of Music for Two or
More Pianos. Of the three, only Piano Phase remained on the composer’s works
list after the early 1970s.
Improvisation, Two Variations on a Watermelon 223

Table 10.3 Fairleigh-Dickinson University Program, January 5, 1967

An Evening of Music by Steve Reich

Music for Two Pianos and Tape (2/64)

Art Murphy and Steve Reich, Pianos
It’s Gonna Rain – or meet Brother Walter in Union Square
after listening to Terry Riley (1/65)
intermission
Saxophone Phase (12/66)
Jon Gibson, Soprano Saxophone
Piano Phase (12/66)
Steve Reich and Art Murphy, Pianos
Come Out (4/66)
Composed as part of a benefit held at Town Hall in April of 1966 for the re-trial -
with lawyers of their own choosing- of the six boys arrested for murder during the
Harlem ‘Fruit Stand Riots’ of 1964. The voice is that of Daniel Hamm, 19, one
of the six now serving a life sentence. He is describing a beating he took in the
Harlem 28th precinct. The police were about to take the boys to Harlem
Hospital to get them cleaned up and were only taking those that were
visably [sic] bleeding. Since Hamm had no actual open bleeding he
proceeded to squeeze open a bruise on his leg so that he would be taken to
the hospital. - “I had to like open the bruise up and let some of the bruise
blood come out to show them.”
intermission
Two Variations on a Watermelon (5 & 11/66)
Art Murphy and Steve Reich, Pianos
Melodica (5/66)

Source: Archived program, folder “Programme Jan 1967,” Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel.

Music for Two or More Pianos or Piano and Tape (1964)

In the fall of 1965, around the same time that Reich moved back to New York
City from San Francisco, John Cage began assembling an archive of manuscripts
from as many composers as he could convince to participate.17 He had two
goals for his collection. First, his aesthetic objective was to reflect the widest
possible range of notational practices in use at the time. He intended to dis-
play the collection in art galleries and museums not only as aural documents
but also as visual objects. Cage had hoped to use these exhibits to accom-
plish his second goal, which was to raise funds for his nonprofit organization,
the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts.18 The archive eventually
224 Reich Revisited

held contributions from Karlheinz Stockhausen, Henry Cowell, and Leonard

Bernstein, among many others, with a particular emphasis on graphical no-
tation, textual scores, and other avant-garde manuscript practices.19 Cage
published 260 of these scores in an anthology entitled Notations in 1969.20
Piano Phase MS January 1967b appears on page  179 of that (unpaginated)
anthology, featuring twelve modules that phase the more familiar B minor
motive against itself.
Archived correspondence indicates that Piano Phase was not Reich’s orig-
inal contribution to Cage’s collection. In a letter to Cage dated January 13, 1967
(now archived in Basel), Reich referred to a recent conversation between the
two men at a concert in Central Park and described having sent Cage a “mul-
tiple piano piece from 1964” some months prior—somewhere in the middle
of his Piano Phase timeline—but was now enclosing another new work to re-
place the earlier one: “something just completed—at least in its initial stage.”21
Though Reich does not name either score, it is reasonably clear from his de-
scription that he originally sent Music for Two or More Pianos and replaced it
with Piano Phase, having premiered it at Fairleigh-Dickinson University only
eight days earlier.
Music for Two or More Pianos is in part an indeterminate work, with nine
harmonic modules that strictly limit what notes the pianists play but do not
dictate precisely how to do so or how many times they should play through
the score. Reich has described its open form and specific instrumentation as
having been influenced by Stockhausen’s Refrain from 1959 and Feldman’s Piece
for Four Pianos from 1962 (though Potter asserts he could not have known the
Feldman piece in 1964);22 he also emphasizes that its overall harmonic palette
had been “particularly influenced by the sound of Bill Evans,” the noted jazz pi-
anist.23 In a letter to Suzuki, Reich described seeing this as “much influenced by
jazz structure (a sequence of chords which form a cycle which can be repeated
for as many ‘choruses’ as you like).”24 By invoking “choruses,” even highlighting
the term with quotation marks, Reich connected the avant-garde indeterminacy
of the composition’s form to the scaffolding jazz musicians traditionally use to
structure their improvisation.
Reich seems to have revived this Evans-inspired work at some point in
1966, perhaps around the same time that he reconnected with his former
Juilliard classmate Arthur Murphy, after which the two began rehearsing and
experimenting musically together. Murphy, also a composer, graduated with
a master of science degree from Juilliard in spring 1966 and was at that time
particularly consumed with Bill Evans and his style. Murphy had become a
close confidant of Evans and was working closely with the pianist on several
transcriptions of his improvisations for eventual publication.25 The creative
interaction that blossomed between Reich and Murphy in 1966 eventually
became a key component in the Piano Phase timeline: Reich’s program notes
Improvisation, Two Variations on a Watermelon 225

after 1970 frequently describe “a period of several months [after Melodica in

which] Art Murphy and I, first [started] working at home playing against tape
loops of ourselves, and later on two pianos.”26 Most of this statement survives
even in the autobiographical Writings mentioned earlier; once again, these
comments could just as easily describe rehearsals for Music for Two or More
Pianos. The 1966 revival of this “multiple piano piece from 1964” testifies
to a rich network of creative exchange involving Reich, Murphy, and Evans
in 1966.
In his notes for Piano Phase, Reich asserted that his first efforts to forge a
new path toward live performance involved prerecording a pattern on the piano
“and then tr[ying] to play against the loop.”27 Such description bears a striking
resemblance to the performing instructions for Music for Two or More Pianos
in its piano and tape configuration, wherein one of the pianos may be replaced
by “recordings of the chord series [which] must be made prior to performance
by the performer(s) involved.”28 Still other similarities can be identified between
the two works, from the performers’ freedom to pace their own progression
through the piece and to perform the work as many times as they like, to the
fact that melodies and other objects of musical interest emerge from unplanned
collisions of minimally planned elements: “resulting possibilities of repetition
[and] imitation of single notes, intervals, chords, [and] melodic fragments,” as
the notes to Music for Two or More Pianos explain.29
Several writers have observed that Music for Two or More Pianos prefigures
the composer’s later and more familiar works from his phase-shifting period,
both in its measure-length modularity and in its use of modal harmonies.30
Reich himself has even suggested that Music for Two or More Pianos may have
predated Terry Riley’s In C, long considered the seminal work of modular-
repetitive minimalism, by a few days.31 This older keyboard duet was Reich’s
last work to require live performance before he began to focus, rather unusually,
on spoken-word tape pieces.32 It was a thread that he abandoned in 1964 and
picked up again in 1966.
Music for Two or More Pianos thus bookended that period of tape compo-
sition that resulted in It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966), marking
both its beginning and end.33 The more strictly controlled processes of Piano
Phase replaced the indeterminate/improvisational Music for Two or More
Pianos as Reich’s representative work in Cage’s Notations anthology. The ev-
idence from archival correspondence and manuscripts, the timing of Reich’s
early collaborations with Murphy, and the knowledge that Music for Two or
More Pianos featured prominently—and for the last time—at the Fairleigh-
Dickinson concert strongly suggest that Reich first satisfied his desire to
abandon tape for instrumental music by reviving his last live-performed com-
position, Music for Two or More Pianos, until Piano Phase superseded it and
rendered it obsolete.
226 Reich Revisited

Variations/Improvisations on a Watermelon (1966)

and the Piano Phase Improvisation

A newly composed piano duet also appeared in the midst of Reich’s 1966 Piano
Phase timeline, best known today as Improvisations on a Watermelon. The title
makes even more explicit the composer’s claim to openness and spontaneity
than did the earlier Music for Two or More Pianos. As shown in the program in
Table 10.3, the Improvisations were originally titled Two Variations, and its two
parts date from May and November 1966. As an unscored and eventually with-
drawn work, Improvisations on a Watermelon has tantalized and eluded analysts
and historians. Most of what has been known about the composition came from
Reich’s cursory writings on the subject. The notes attached to the program at
Fairleigh-Dickinson, for example, refer to “a simple shift of accent in a repeated
figure, and a gradual expansion of a two note figure into a five note one.”34 Jon
Gibson has also offered some brief testimony, having been the only other musi-
cian known to have performed it besides Reich and Murphy.35 Although no re-
cording of the Fairleigh-Dickinson premiere is known to exist, Reich’s archives
now contain two recordings of the work from a few months later.36 They offer
the best entrée and illuminate many elements that were uncertain or unknown
about this ephemeral work.
The harmony featured in the accompaniment throughout the Improvisations,
shown in the keyboard 2 part in Example 10.2, links the work to Reich’s music
soundtrack for the controversial experimental film Oh Dem Watermelons
(1965). For that soundtrack, which was originally intended to be performed
live during the film’s screening, Reich had arranged the minstrel songs “Massa’s
in de Cold Ground” by Stephen Foster and “Oh! Dat Watermelon” by Luke
Schoolcraft. As Sumanth Gopinath explains in his description and analysis of
the soundtrack, Reich had interpreted Schoolcraft’s song as a jaunty gospel- or
rag-like two-step dance, with a highly rhythmic accompaniment characterized
by “boom-chick” or “oom-pah” patterns over a do-sol bass. At the appearance
of an especially pungent cluster chord, A3–C♯4–D4–G4—variously described

Example 10.2 Transcribed selection from Reich’s first Variation on a Watermelon

Source: Digitized archival recording of March 19, 1967, performance at Park Place Gallery,
CD 1, Track 2 (Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel), 0:54–1:19.
Improvisation, Two Variations on a Watermelon 227

as a “dirty dominant” in D major, a “suspended dominant,” and a “synthesis of

tonic and dominant”—Reich’s arrangement veers off into an extended repeti-
tive canon on the word “watermelon.”37 In Gopinath’s reading, this musical pas-
sage and its analogy to “a record stuck in a groove” forms a musical moment in
which the forward progress of time has been suspended. Eventually, this tempo-
rally frozen “dirty dominant” finds resolution on a D major tonic, as the canon
ends and the film soundtrack continues with the return of the minstrel song.
According to Gopinath, Reich effectively bracketed and contained the canon’s
mesmerizing and chaotic complexity within the overall song, granting it space
while at the same time controlling it.38
By contrast, resolution never comes in the piano variations. The record (as
it were) remains permanently stuck in its groove, stripping the “dirty domi-
nant” of its progressive function and turning it into something like a quartal
(or “stacked-fourth”) cluster chord in A Mixolydian. Within that tense stasis,
improvisational spontaneity replaces the canon’s chaos. Yet it is the rhythmic
elements of this accompaniment and their relationship to the melodic solo
part that are most relevant to the present study. Similar to the Schoolcraft
song setting, both piano variations involve a repeated “oom-pah” accompani-
ment part in one keyboard, as seen in Example 10.2. Each four-beat measure
contains three “oom-pah” patterns, followed by two eighth notes that propel
the pattern back into itself. The melodic solo part features a new rag-like or
Latin tune, not heard in the original film soundtrack, whose syncopations play
off against the steady metrical foundation of the accompaniment (see the key-
board 1 part in Ex. 10.2).
Reich’s “shift of accent in a repeated figure” occurs in the middle measure of
Example 10.2, when the upbeat eighth notes in the second keyboard expand to
add a third, immediately displacing the downbeats of the two patterns in the
following measure by an eighth. The process repeats, and the downbeats are
displaced by two eighths, then three, and so on. The two parts return to syn-
chrony at the end of the variation. It is thus not the conspicuous melodic part
that changes to produce the shift, but the apparently subordinate accompanying
part. Not merely suggestive of the gradual and continuous phase-shifting pro-
cess as Reich would codify in Piano Phase later that year, this process resembles
even more the nongradual, discrete phase-shifting process of Clapping Music
(1972), which most have considered to be a later development.39 Reich’s later
take on the live-performed phase-shifting technique in fact appears to have
been one of his first. Note, once again, that this first variation appeared in May
1966, in the earliest days of Reich’s search for a way to apply phase shifting to live
performance. The efforts that ultimately resulted in Piano Phase most immedi-
ately produced the first Variation on a Watermelon.
The second variation, transcribed in full in Appendix 1 to this chapter, is more
open-ended than the first, wherein all the note-to-note details are rather more
strictly controlled. Between the two variations, the accompanying part drops its
228 Reich Revisited

upbeat eighths and alters the basic elements of its regular pattern: adding and
then dropping again the upper sol to its do-sol bass (at time marking 2:51 and
4:55); eliminating beats to produce meters with a duple and triple pulse (3:56,
5:00, etc.); and slightly shifting the harmonic cluster within the Mixolydian col-
lection (4:26, 4:55, 5:34, etc.). In this variation, the more prominent solo part
presents Reich’s “gradual expansion of a two note figure into a five note one,”
from the F♯5–E5 dyad at 3:17 to the five-pitch collection at 4:24 (F♯5, E5, D5, C♯5,
B4)—and back a few minutes later (6:22–7:11), though he never refers to the
pattern’s contraction. Complex patterns emerge between this expansion and con-
traction: the slight hesitations and subtle rhythmic adjustments in the recording
suggest that these melodic figures were being created spontaneously in perfor-
mance. The transcription notates what was an undifferentiated stream of pitches
in the audio with stems and beams moving in alternating directions, a choice
that highlights the steady oscillating dyad F♯5–D5 and isolates it to the pianist’s
right hand. The results plausibly resemble the composer’s “stacked-hand” dis-
position of Piano Phase shown in Figure 10.1. This, and not some Scarlattian
arm-crossing technique, is likely what Reich meant when he described these
improvisations as “hand-over-hand variations.”40
Many of the common features previously identified in Music for Two or More
Pianos and Piano Phase may also be seen in these Variations, from their modular
repetitions and modal harmonies to their instrumentation and performance
practice. Though the program notes do not mention it, they could just as easily
be performed in a piano-plus-tape configuration as they could live, and in-
deed likely were rehearsed in this live-electronic configuration, since Reich and
Murphy did not have access to a pair of pianos until very close to the premiere.41
Of further note is the hint of “gradual process” in both of these variations, namely,
their “shifts of accent” and “expansion[s]” of a small figure against a steadily
pulsed accompaniment. The unplanned collisions of minimally preplanned mu-
sical figures form further conceptual links to Music for Two or More Pianos and
reveal a richly interconnected network of musical relationships among these
keyboard compositions. These playful and spontaneous interactions between
the two hands thus appear to have been the reason for Reich’s changing the
work’s title from Variations in January 1967 to Improvisations before March
1967.42 The second variation/improvisation dates from November 1966, just
days before the earliest manuscripts for Piano Phase and its sibling work Reed
Phase. Not only does their history overlap with the timeline for Piano Phase, but
they also represent early expressions of ideas now firmly associated with that
and other later works. Though Improvisations on a Watermelon appeared as a
separate composition with its own premiere at Fairleigh-Dickinson University
in January 1967, it was, in effect, a first draft for Piano Phase.
There is even more reason to wonder at Reich’s insistent foreclosure of any
role that improvisation played at the premiere of Piano Phase. Unlike the piano
duets already described, a recording of the Fairleigh-Dickinson performance of
Improvisation, Two Variations on a Watermelon 229

Piano Phase does exist among Reich’s archives in Basel. According to this audio
document, Reich and Murphy performed through the MS December 1966 twice.
We might represent the overall form of these two presentations of the Piano
Phase process as A–A. Between these two A sections at the premiere—bracketed
and contained by them, perhaps, in a manner similar to the chaos of the canon
in the Oh Dem Watermelons soundtrack—Reich and Murphy performed a two-
minute improvisational riff on the Piano Phase figure as a contrasting B section,
which resembles the second Variation on a Watermelon. A transcription of this
improvisation from the 1967 Piano Phase performance appears in Appendix
2 to this chapter. In this previously unknown passage, as in the Variations, the
improvising performer plays with the order and lengths of the figures in each
hand, resulting once again in minimally planned, in-the-moment patterns and
figurations in the spontaneous collisions of the two parts.

Conclusion

Returning now to Reich’s most emphatic claims about Piano Phase—namely,

that he and Murphy “were not improvising” at its premiere—the composer was
less likely denying the existence of the improvisational passage transcribed in
Appendix 2 than insisting that the phase-shifting process itself was not improv-
isational. It is this process that survived the period of development and revi-
sion that followed the premiere and came to dominate Reich’s compositional
strategies through the mid-1970s. In an early version of “Music as a Gradual
Process,” published in the same Anti-Illusion catalog as the December 1966
Piano Phase manuscript, Reich declared that such processes offered him greater
control over every aspect of the work and its performance:
Musical processes can give one a direct contact with the impersonal and also a
kind of complete control. [. . .] By “a kind” of complete control I mean that by
running this material through this process I completely control all that results,
but also that I accept all that results without changes.43
Among the “bi-products [sic] of the intended process” that Reich described
as part of this new emphasis on the impersonal, he included “sub-melodies
heard within repeated melodic patterns” and “slight irregularities in perfor-
mance”—those spontaneous and emergent effects that resemble the “resulting
possibilities” described in the notes to Music for Two or More Pianos, and thus
which describe well his approach to improvisation in early 1967.44 He now ac-
cepted “all that results,” perhaps, but neither as indeterminacy nor as improvisa-
tion: these results, soon to be called “resulting patterns” in Violin Phase (1967),
were now bracketed and contained—in a word, controlled—and the composer’s
ownership over them retained. By the end of the decade, these features were no
longer “improvisational” but had become aspects of the “impersonal.” In his
230 Reich Revisited

1974 Writings about Music, “Music as a Gradual Process” appeared with a new
penultimate paragraph. Process was in and improvisation was out: “The distinc-
tive thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-to-note
details and the over all [sic] form simultaneously. One can’t improvise in a mu-
sical process—the concepts are mutually exclusive.”45
The social and political implications of this new attitude toward improvi-
sation extend beyond the more abstract power dynamics between composer
and performer. By 1974, when Writings about Music first appeared in print,
Reich and Philip Glass had parted ways with some still-cryptic acrimony,
and the musicians who had once performed for both were forced to choose
between them. Jon Gibson, to whom Reich had dedicated Reed Phase, chose
Glass. Arthur Murphy, the consummate improviser and Reich’s close collabo-
rator since the mid-1960s, chose to stay with Reich but had left Steve Reich and
Musicians by July 1972.46 Reed Phase went the way of the keyboard duets and
was also soon withdrawn.
Additionally, as Reich’s interest in Indonesian and Ghanaian music grew to-
ward the end of the 1960s, along with an increased anxiety about the cultural
appropriation of non-Western practices, so too did his rejection of improvisa-
tion: “I am not interested in improvisation,” he declared in the May 1969 con-
cert program, “or in sounding exotic.”47 Yet, unlike Cage’s dismissal of jazz and
improvisation—and therefore African American experimentalism—Reich’s
critique seemed most pointed at the ostensibly white avant-garde itself. In his
1973 “Notes on the Ensemble,” he took special aim at “a certain idea that’s been
in the air, particularly since the 1960s, and it’s been used by choreographers
as well as composers and I think it is an extremely misleading idea,” namely,
“that the only pleasure a performer (be it musician or dancer) could get was
to improvise, or in some way be free to express his or her momentary state of
mind.”48 Instead, he argued, musicians find joy in performing the music they
love, and “whether that music is improvised or completely worked out is really
not the main issue. The main issue is what’s happening musically; is this beau-
tiful, is this sending chills up and down my spine, or isn’t it?”49 Reich no longer
accepted improvisation as a fulfilling pursuit in his own work and rejected the
argument that improvisation alone could offer performers a legitimate or ful-
filling experience.
There are good reasons to treat Reich’s account of the origins of Piano
Phase as abridged and simplified, no more detailed than it needed to be for
his own purposes. The composer’s views of his own life and works surely
are not subject to the same pressures and expectations as those motivating
music scholars. The revised chronology traced in this chapter nevertheless
forces us to crucially re-evaluate our understanding of Reich’s compositional
development while offering new aural delights and further opportunities
for examining sound and meaning in the composer’s music. Evidence from
his archives at PSS now offers us a new timeline for the origins of Piano
Improvisation, Two Variations on a Watermelon 231

Table 10.4 A new timeline for Piano Phase, from its precedents to its premiere

Date Event

May 22, 1966 Reich composes Melodica and turns to live performance
May 1966 Reich creates the first Variation on a Watermelon
Early to mid-1966? Reich begins collaborating privately with Arthur Murphy
Mid- to late 1966? Reich sends MS Music for Two or More Pianos to Cage
November 1966 Reich creates the second Variation on a Watermelon
December 1966 Reich composes the first versions of Piano Phase and
Reed Phase
Early January 1967 Reich and Murphy finally rehearse on two pianos
January 5, 1967 Reich and Murphy perform three piano duets at
Fairleigh-Dickinson University

Phase, slightly different and more detailed than his own story (summarized
in Table 10.4), to wit: around the time that Reich completed Melodica and
began turning his thoughts toward live performance, he revived his im-
provisational Music for Two or More Pianos or Piano and Tape, sending it
to Cage as his representative contribution to the Notations collection, and
commenced private collaborations with Arthur Murphy, each man working
in his studio with piano and tape. The creative interaction between Murphy
and Reich resulted most immediately in two improvisational keyboard var-
iations based on Reich’s Oh Dem Watermelons score, which appeared in
May and November, followed by the earliest manuscripts for Piano Phase
and Reed Phase in December. Piano Phase premiered in January 1967 with
a short improvisational passage, thereafter excised and never again ac-
knowledged. The two musicians presented several versions of Piano Phase
throughout 1967 and then performed it in its final and most familiar form
in January 1968. Only then was it complete, having taken the form known
to listeners and performers today, without a trace of the improvisations that
had characterized its compositional process.

Notes

1. Reich 1974, 51–52.

2. Reich 2002b, 34–36; Steve Reich: Phase to Face 2011c, 16:47–18:19.
3. See, for example, Mertens 1983, 49–50; Suzuki 1991, 461–67; Schwarz 1996,
64–66; Potter 2000, 181–88; Ross 2007, 501; Taruskin 2009, 373–74.
4. Reich 1993, 38.
5. See Piekut 2014.
6. Lewis 1996; see also Kostelanetz 1970, 161–63.
232 Reich Revisited

7. See Belgrad 1998; Cox 2002; Lewis 2004; Kim 2008, 2012; Feisst 2009;
Gendron 2010; Piekut 2011, 2013, 2014.
8. “A much more widespread view that has evolved in the Eurological music
circles with regard to improvisation is the notion that, to be musically coherent, im-
provisation cannot be left as ‘free,’ but must instead be ‘controlled’ or ‘structured’ in
some way” (Lewis 1996, 115).
9. See especially Dennis 1974; R. D. Morris 1988; Fink 1999; Horlacher 2000/
2001; Christensen 2004; Botha 2010.
10. Reich 1969c, 29; 1980c.
11. Potter 2000, 182; Suzuki 1991, 462.
12. Note, for example, that in both MS December 1966 and MS January 1967 the
performance note ends with the statement: “This is a work in progress.” See Reich
1969b, 1969c.
13. This was strongly suggested in March 1967, as Klaas van der Linden first
noted, when Reich hung two early manuscripts for Piano Phase on the exhibit wall
at Park Place Gallery in Manhattan, noting on a nearby placard:  “the two scores
of Piano Phase represent two versions of the same musical process” (Van der
Linden 2010, 4). The connections between Reich and the concept and process art
movements were most recently asserted by Ross Cole (2014). This topic is one of the
oldest within the intellectual discourse on minimalism generally, and Reich specifi-
cally; see, for example, Bernard 1993; Hitchcock 1996.
14. This emergent melody, which one can hear even when only one pianist
plays the opening Piano Phase motive, is different from those “resulting patterns”
described in Epstein 1986, which are the result of the melody being phase-shifted
against itself.
15. Potter 2000, 187, 191, 234, 241.
16. See, for example, Potter 2000, 181; Strickland 1993, 197; Suzuki 1991, 456.
17. Silverman 2012, 220–25.
18. See the preface to Cage 1969.
19. See the appendix entitled “Works in the Archive,” in Cage 1969, [251–70].
20. Cage 1969.
21. Reich, New York City, to John Cage, Stony Point, New York, January 13, 1967
(Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel). The concert to which Reich refers was likely the
New Year’s Eve Central Park performance in Clark 1967.
22. Potter 2000, 162.
23. Suzuki 1991, 438.
24. Ibid.
25. See B. Evans 1969, 1984; Pettinger 1998, 197.
26. Archived program from Berkeley University Art Museum dated November
7, 1970, folder “Programme 1970 Nov.” (Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel).
27. Reich 1974, 51.
28. Reich 2002b, 12–13.
29. See the performance instructions as published in Reich 2002b, 12.
30. Potter 2000, 162; Reich 2001, 11.
Improvisation, Two Variations on a Watermelon 233

31. Suzuki 1991, 435; Carl 2009, 37.

32. Potter 2000, 162.
33. Gopinath (2005) has noted the exceptionalism of this period of tape com-
position from 1965 to 1966, describing it as “a rupture in the history of Reich’s
music and American experimental composition” (4), not only in its embrace of tape
and technology as compositional media, but most especially in its radical political
commitments.
34. Archived program from Fairleigh-Dickinson University dated January 5,
1967, folder “Programme Jan 1967” (Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel).
35. Suzuki 1991, 439–40; Potter 2000, 170; Gopinath 2011, 164.
36. Digitized archival recording of March 19, 1967, performance at Park Place
Gallery, CD 1, Track 2 (Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel).
37. Gopinath 2011, 157, 160; Potter 2000, 170.
38. Gopinath 2011, 160–61.
39. See Potter 2000, 225; Reich 2002b, 68; Hartenberger 2013, 371–72.
40. Potter 2000, 170; Gopinath 2011, 164.
41. Reich 1993, 40.
42. See the archived program from Park Place Gallery, March 17–19, 1967,
folder “Programme Mai 1969” (Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel).
43. Reich 1969a, 56.
44. Ibid., 57.
45. Reich 1974, 11.
46. Murphy’s last appearance as a named member of the Steve Reich and
Musicians ensemble was on an archived program dated July 13, 1972, for a perfor-
mance of Drumming at the “Spiel, Klang, Elektronik, Licht” festival in West Berlin.
See archived program dated July 13, 1972, folder “Programme Jul 1972” (Steve Reich
Collection, PSS, Basel).
47. Archived program from Whitney Museum dated May 27, 1969, folder
“Programme Mai 1969” (Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel).
48. Reich 1974, 46–47.
49. Ibid.
234 Reich Revisited

Appendix 1 Transcription of the March 1967 Performance of the second Variation on

a Watermelon.
Source: Digitized archival recording of March 19, 1967, performance at Park Place Gallery,
CD 1, Track 2 (Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel). Note that the archival recording continues
with a second performance of the Second Variation.
Improvisation, Two Variations on a Watermelon 235

Appendix 1 Continued
236 Reich Revisited

Appendix 1 Continued
Improvisation, Two Variations on a Watermelon 237

Appendix 2 The Piano Phase improvisation, January 1967.

Source:  Digitized archival recording of January 5, 1967, performance at Fairleigh-
Dickinson University Art Gallery, CD 25, Track 5 (Steve Reich Collection, PSS, Basel).
11

Steve Reich’s Counterpoints and Computers

Rethinking the 1980s

Twila Bakker

This chapter aims to re-evaluate the role of Steve Reich’s 1980s Counterpoint
series in the context of his reinvention as a venerated member of New York’s
new music establishment. A consideration of these works’ prominence in the
performed repertoire and their critical reception demonstrates how Reich re-
engaged with past compositional interests now couched in more conventional
terminology, facilitating his gradual transformation from outsider to insider.
Concurrently with this transition to tradition came a personal change with
Reich’s first use of the computer as a compositional tool. An exploration of this
development offers insights into how he has since then pragmatically incor-
porated digital compositional habits alongside previous analog ones, all while
maintaining his recently secured foothold in the Western classical canon. The
Counterpoints’ aesthetic compactness, their continuities with the composer’s
earlier works, and their popularity among performers make them an ideal case
study for observing these shifts in Reich’s compositional output.

The Counterpoints: The Stuff of History

Following on from the popularity of his Music for 18 Musicians (1976) and its
commercial release on ECM records in 1978, Reich’s music thrived and his rep-
utation increased during the 1980s, appealing to, and connecting with, a much
wider audience than had previously been the case. He became the archetypal
artist who—while managing to remain true to his aesthetic convictions—
nevertheless transmuted those ideas into an art form that was direct, accessible,
and increasingly popular among performers and musicians outside of Reich’s
own ensemble.
In the 1980s, Reich began working exclusively with Nonesuch Records,
whose director, Robert Hurwitz, Reich had known from his days at ECM, fol-
lowing the director when he made the transition to the new label.1 During this
time, Reich’s commissions accumulated with a steady consistency (see Table
11.1) and with them associations with several prestigious musicians and per-
forming ensembles, an external indicator of commercial success. By this time,

239
240 Reich Revisited

Table 11.1 Steve Reich’s 1980s compositions with commissioners listed

Year Work Commissioned by

1981 Tehillim West German Radio, Cologne; South

German Radio, Stuttgart; and Rothko
Chapel, Houston
1982 Vermont Counterpoint Ransom Wilson
1983 Eight Lines/Octet (1979) 1979: Hessischer Rundfunk
1984 The Desert Music West German Radio, Cologne, and the
Brooklyn Academy of Music
1985 Sextet Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians and the
French government for Nexus
1985 New York Counterpoint Fromm Music Foundation for Richard
Stoltzman
1986 Three Movements St. Louis Symphony Orchestra
1986 Six Marimbas/Six Pianos —
(1973)
1987 The Four Sections Mrs. Ralph I. Dorfman for the San Francisco
Symphony in honor of its seventy-fifth
anniversary
1987 Electric Counterpoint Brooklyn Academy of Music and the
Brooklyn Philharmonic for Pat Metheny
1988 Different Trains Betty Freeman for the Kronos Quartet

Sourced from Hoek 2002, 32–37.

one can safely proclaim that Reich had “made it” as a composer, yet critics—
then and since—have often decried Reich’s music from this period as coming up
short, despite the fact that the decade started with the very original-sounding
Tehillim (1981) for voices and ensemble, and culminated with the powerful
Different Trains (1988) for string quartet and tape.
In comparison with these two landmark compositions, the Counterpoints
and other works from the 1980s have generally been underrepresented in schol-
arship. Some critics have characterized this period as Reich’s less than successful
orchestral decade—which is intriguing, since Reich himself rather controver-
sially predicted an end to the orchestra during the early 1970s.2 Rather than en-
gaging with the 1980s as Reich’s “period of reinvention,” scholars have focused
instead on the pantheon of watershed works from the 1960 through 1970s—
the early tape pieces, the phase pieces, Drumming (1970–71), and Music for 18
Musicians—before leaping forward to Different Trains and then on to some of
Reich’s more recent works.3 This omission is surprising, since (and in contrast
with other compositions from Reich’s oeuvre) performances of the Counterpoints
Steve Reich’s Counterpoints and Computers 241

have been widespread. For example, between 2001 and 2013, the three counter-
point pieces composed during the 1980s accounted for an average of 14 percent
of the performances advertised on Reich’s personal website, whereas the much
more frequently discussed “Phase” pieces amounted to only 8 percent. A survey
of the same body of performances found that concerts including a Reich com-
position from the 1980s amounted to just over 27 percent. From this, it can be
stated with some certainty that the compositions from the 1980s—including the
Counterpoints—have become part of standard contemporary repertoire, even
though they have not afforded an equitable amount of research.
How did this group of compositions first emerge? In the early 1980s, Reich
received a telephone call from American flute virtuoso Ransom Wilson. During
the call, Wilson petitioned the composer to write a flute concerto for him.
Reich’s response to the request was an emphatic and swift refusal; he would
not—could not—write a concerto. Yet doubts must have lingered because, as
Reich later recounted, he realized that turning away a musician of Wilson’s cal-
iber seemed a foolish thing to do.4 Re-evaluating the situation, Reich returned
Wilson’s phone call proposing a solution that he felt would work for both com-
poser and commissioner: not a concerto but an updated version of Violin Phase
(1967),5 with Wilson prerecording multiple lines of music to play against in live
performance.
This collaborative effort with Wilson was to become the first of Reich’s
Counterpoint series:  Vermont Counterpoint (1982), followed by New  York
Counterpoint (1985) and Electric Counterpoint (1987), and after a long hiatus
Cello Counterpoint (2003).6 Interspersed between some of Reich’s larger en-
semble works, the 1980s Counterpoints can be understood in part as microcosms
of Reich’s adjustments to the ethos of the time—while still maintaining the aes-
thetic ideals found in his early works. With Ronald Reagan’s two-term presidency
reflecting a shift to the right in US politics of the time,7 Reich likewise became
firmly entrenched in what has been touted as the new phase of his compositional
style—one that rendered “the bare-bones variety of minimalism . . . the stuff of
history.”8 On the surface, the story of Reich rejecting a concerto commission fits
into the late 1960s and early 1970s image of the composer, perpetuated through
the recounting of stories such as his Mills College encounter with composer
Luciano Berio, which often finds Reich donning a heavy Italian accent while re-
peating a variation of “If you want to write tonal music, then why don’t you write
tonal music.”9 As such the rejection of the concerto commission meshes with the
idea of Reich as the rebellious yet talented composer steeped in America’s West
Coast counterculture before finding his way home to the galleries and lofts of
downtown New York City.
With Vermont Counterpoint “updating” Violin Phase, Reich returned to
and reclaimed a part of his own compositional technique left dormant during
the 1970s: a tape accompanist. However, unlike Violin Phase’s tape, which re-
quired a mere three additional lines creating a quasi-quartet with the live line,
242 Reich Revisited

Vermont’s tape called for ten recorded flute lines fashioning a “concerto for one,”
and therefore allowing Reich to respond, in his own way, to Wilson’s request.
Although it is sometimes performed by ensembles, the combination of tape and
live remains Reich’s preferred instrumentation format for the Counterpoints—
where the ultimate effect is to train the audience’s attention on the soloist with
an extremely focused sound. Tape accompaniment can achieve this because, as
Reich has stated, “if the live player plays the piece correctly then the ensemble
will be spot on.”10
Critic Gregory Sandow was not overly enthusiastic about Vermont
Counterpoint’s engagement with an invisible accompanist, finding that the tape
part acted subversively, making it impossible for the audience to understand the
performance without the aid of the program note.11 Four years later, New York
Counterpoint hardly fared better in Sandow’s eyes (or ears), as he still took issue
with Reich’s use of multitrack technology:
Part of the musical point of the piece, though, is that the 11 parts should speak
with the same voice, and so to anyone sensitive to the inevitable theatrical com-
ponent of any musical performance, “New York Counterpoint” contains a built-
in contradiction. All 11 parts must be played by the same clarinetist; the piece
can look convincing or sound the way Mr. Reich wants it to, but not both.12
By the time Electric Counterpoint entered the repertoire, other critics were
also beginning to react to the concept less favorably. Kyle Gann, then writing
in the Village Voice, felt that the Counterpoints seemed “disposable and infi-
nitely extendable. (New  York Counterpoint, Vermont Counterpoint:  can Lunch
Counterpoint be far behind?).” For Gann, Pat Metheny (for whom Electric was
written; see Table 11.1) was forced into the predictable short repeated motives
of the Counterpoints, and no consideration was paid to his unique performative
abilities.13
Although one can readily hear Reich’s creative imprint in the Counterpoints,
there are nevertheless distinctive qualities that belong to the new style of
the 1980s. K.  Robert Schwarz has maintained that Reich’s music was still
characterized by an inherent tension between “intuition” and “process” while
simultaneously preserving the integrity of the underlying musical process.14
Rather than adhering to the ideology of impersonality codified in his oft-quoted
essay “Music as a Gradual Process” (1968), in Schwarz’s and others’ assessment,
Reich could be seen to be moving toward more intuitive forms of composi-
tion well before the 1980s. After completing Drumming in 1971, the composer
relinquished his fixation on phase shifting and embraced new techniques such
as combining rhythmic construction and multiple canons. Reflecting on the
change in his aesthetic approach in an interview with composer and critic
Michael Nyman in 1976, Reich commented:
The early pieces are very forceful examples of a strict working out of certain
new ideas even though they had certain relationships to canonic structure
Steve Reich’s Counterpoints and Computers 243

and augmentation. But once you’ve done that what do you do? Just sit there
cranking out one perfect phase piece after another? Personally, as a human
being, I  feel the need to move on, not to sell out or cop out, but just to
move on.15
Not looking so much to compromise but rather to grow, Reich took the
techniques he had developed in his pre-1968 compositions and applied them
in increasing and varied ways. Even prior to Music for 18 Musicians, Reich was
gradually starting to edge toward the insider status he achieved over the course
of the 1980s, noting that in all his music there was an underlying structure but
warning that the structure was not “merely systematic” as that would become
uninteresting.16
On the other hand, notwithstanding Reich’s claims that he wasn’t about
to sit and churn out more “perfect” phase pieces, Vermont Counterpoint was
advertised from its outset as an updated Violin Phase, with the composer stating
that “the techniques used [in Vermont] include several that I discovered as early
as 1967.”17 Like Violin Phase, Vermont consists of several concise linear, me-
lodic ideas. Throughout the course of the composition typically three patterns
or at most (very briefly) five melodic patterns are heard simultaneously (al-
though there are in fact a total of seventeen musical patterns in Vermont). The
busiest moments in Vermont occur during the transition from section III to IV
(rehearsal numbers 69 and 70); and although five melodic patterns are present,
only three rhythmic patterns occur (with two other patterns augmenting into
chordal figurations).
While some of these techniques are somewhat consistent with earlier works,
one can identify a shift in approach. Rather than adhering to what Catherine
Cameron has noted as a persistent theme in American composers’ self-
commentaries, namely, “the goal of creating a musical [tradition] based more
closely on American [musical] culture and history rather than simply bor-
rowing from European . . . resources,” Reich reverts to employing conventional
language to describe his music.18
One factor that did change between Violin Phase and Vermont was Reich’s
admission of the function of “canon” in his music. In the program note to Violin
Phase, Reich’s vocabulary is replete with references to “psycho-acoustic by-
products” and “phase-shifting” but includes no mention of canon, although by
1974—in the “Notes on Compositions 1965–1973” section of his Writings about
Music—Reich remarks that in retrospect he understood “gradually shifting
phase relations . . . as an extension of the idea of infinite canon or round.”19 In
his note to Vermont, Reich describes its two-part compositional system in more
traditional language, avoiding terms or phrases developed in earlier writings
such as “shifting phase relations”:

Primarily building up canons between short repeating melodic patterns by

substituting notes for rests and then playing melodies that result from their
244 Reich Revisited

combination. These resulting melodies or melodic patterns then become the

basis for the following section as the other surrounding parts in the contra-
puntal web fade out.20
New York Counterpoint’s program note also evinces a dichotomy between old
and new Reich. The use of interlocking repeated patterns on multiples of the
same instrument draws on the earlier Phase works, but the rate of change in the
patterns themselves reflects more recent works such as Sextet (1985). The use
of more standard music terminology indicates Reich’s willingness to bring the
public’s perception of him in line with the notions of “middle-class favorites”21
in musical reception and understanding. The utilization of such conventional
terms would not be out of place in describing the music of Bach or Beethoven,
for example.
In his note on New York Counterpoint, Reich also writes about exploiting the
ambiguity of dividing 12 into a meter: 3/2 = 6/4 ultimately becomes a large 12/8,
where eighth notes can be grouped in threes (four groups in total) or fours (three
groups in total)—a concept that preoccupied Reich throughout the early 1970s
in works such as Drumming and Music for Pieces of Wood (1973).22 The metrical
opacity afforded by the division of 12 enabled Reich to create the perception of
newness. For example, in discussing New York Counterpoint, he writes:

In the last movement of New  York Counterpoint the bass clarinets function
to accent first one and then the other of these possibilities while the upper
clarinets essentially do not change. The effect, by change of accent, is to vary
the perception of that which in fact is not changing.23
The aural similarities of these pattern-based compositions sometimes cause
confusion, but while patterns still lie at the heart of a composition—repeated
as they are throughout a movement—musical interest is not derived from the
earlier process of a variable distance canon but rather through the shifting of
perceived groupings, revealing a continuity with his 12-division-based works
from the 1970s after Drumming. But perhaps the difference is one of degree
rather than kind. As he notes with respect to Vermont Counterpoint:

[In contrast to my works from 1967], the relatively fast rate of change (there
are rarely more than three repeats of any bar), metric modulation into and out
of a slower tempo, and relatively rapid changes of key may well create a more
concentrated and concise impression.24

Thus, in discussions of the Counterpoints, Reich utilizes traditional vocabu-

lary to describe these compositions rather than developing a new lexicon, as he
had done with previous techniques and compositions. The term “rhythmic con-
struction,” although used in relation with the Counterpoints, was in fact coined
and used by the critic and musicologist K. Robert Schwarz25—unlike “phasing,”
Steve Reich’s Counterpoints and Computers 245

a term that Reich de-emphasized in the years following his application of it to

describe the variable distance canons of his 1960s works. The importance of tra-
dition and convention to Reich in relation to his work can be found in a 2010
interview when the composer is discussing Piano Phase:
It is a weird technique. If you go to a conventional music school anywhere in
the Western world . . . they will not teach you how to phase . . . but there are
other ways of getting what is called . . . a canon or a round. That’s what’s going
on here [referring to a performance of Piano Phase], that’s what’s going on in
It’s Gonna Rain, it’s one sound against itself. That’s a canon; it can be from the
13th century, it can be Johann Sebastian Bach, it can be Béla Bartók, it can be
Steve Reich.26
Phasing is repackaged here, focusing on the elements within it that are orthodox
versus heterodox rather than by simply invoking “a technocrat word” he admits
to being “guilty of coining.”27 With this rather blunt self-assessment, Reich im-
mediately places himself in a historical line that would have been familiar to
him from at least his Cornell University years, when he attended classes with
musicologist William Austin.28 The undergraduate music history sequence
devised by Austin began with Gregorian chant and went up to the death of J. S.
Bach in 1750, at which point chronology would be replaced by what Austin re-
ferred to as serendipitous and parallel musical pathways:  jumping from Bach
and the first half of the eighteenth century to Claude Debussy at the turn of
the twentieth. Austin’s take on music history clearly had an impact on Reich’s
fledgling thoughts about the subject, and the composer can be seen to rehearse
his teacher’s view on several occasions, such as the quip that “If all the music
from Haydn to Wagner were to disappear, I’d miss a few pieces, but most of
it—I wouldn’t even know it was gone. Whereas, to lose Bach, or Stravinsky or
Bartók—the world would be very slim [pickings].”29 Contemporary composi-
tion could—and did, in both Austin’s and Reich’s worlds—fit into music history
by claiming the Baroque tradition as its standard-bearer.
Even the term “counterpoint” recalls the compositional significance of per-
ennial favorite of classical music lovers, J. S. Bach. This link is made explicit
in the sketches for New York Counterpoint where, after noting future designs
for the development of melodic patterns into harmonic ones, Reich signs off
with “QED/J.S.B.”30—an abbreviation of the Latin quod erat demonstrandum
Johann Sebastian Bach—serving as explicit acknowledgment of the composer’s
inspiration for this work. Whether conscious or not, Reich’s invocation of the
father of Baroque music has possible echoes in the Reagan era’s conservative
climate:  a case of the “wacko [minimalist] composers going legit,” to para-
phrase Gann.31
This return to traditional terminology and references to the Baroque
coincides with Reich’s welcome return to the respected concert halls of
246 Reich Revisited

New York, an impressive reversal of public opinion that laid the ghosts of the
1973 Carnegie Hall performance of Reich’s Four Organs to rest.32 By the 1980s,
Reich’s works were being premiered on New  York’s stages facilitated by the
Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and across the country with other ven-
erable backing institutions (see the commissioners listed in Table 11.1). All
the 1980s Counterpoints were premiered at a BAM-sanctioned event; further-
more, both Vermont Counterpoint and Electric Counterpoint appeared as part
of The Next Wave series.33 This was a quite remarkable turn of events for the
composer, as highlighted by critic Tim Page in contrasting the world premiere
of Music for 18 Musicians, which had been “heralded by stark white posters,
decorated with a few measures of music, plastered on the grimy walls of SoHo,”
and the performance of the same a decade or so later as part of the New York
Philharmonic Horizons Festival.34
Some critics, such as New  York Times’ Bernard Holland, found awkward
resonances in Reich’s relationship with the past. In a 1987 review of Electric
Counterpoint’s premiere, Holland laments “[to] a truly avant-garde com-
poser  .  .  .  how debilitating are such reconciliations with the past? I  do not
presume to answer, or tell Mr. Reich which bridges he should burn; but if he
wants, I’ll gladly send him the matches.”35 Writing around the same time, Gann
found the composer embroiled in something of a midlife compositional crisis,
resulting in “European monuments built of African folk-rhythmic units [which]
were marred by a structural incongruity of ends and means, like cathedrals
made from straw.”36
Holland and Gann both share concerns about Reich’s shift from a composer
whose reputation was first established through musical experimentation and
innovation to easy accessibility and commercial success. Holland sees Reich’s
return to traditional models as undermining his status as a groundbreaking
composer, while Gann suggests that Reich’s compositions from the 1980s lack
structural integrity. A narrative begins to emerge from these reviews of a com-
poser passionate for change and reform betraying his younger self. This is also
evident in commentators such as Page and Barbara Jepson, who refer to Reich
in the mid-1980s as a former Young Turk.37
With the Counterpoints, Reich can be seen to standardize the terminology
employed in discussions of his work, linking himself publicly and privately
with composers considered part of the Western classical canon. As Reich was
paid up front to compose and garnered positive attention from important
cultural institutions, a change in his circumstances was gradual but con-
tinuous. Commissions accumulated, and with them came increased media
attention that eventually placed Reich at the center of the classical music
world’s stage. This media attention is echoed in Reich’s own use of conven-
tional terminology, reflecting on his need to strike a balance between inno-
vation and tradition.
Steve Reich’s Counterpoints and Computers 247

Computers: The Mad Scientist’s Invisible Assistant?

As already discussed, with Vermont Counterpoint Steve Reich began again to

use multitrack tape as a “perfect accompanist” after a hiatus from the medium
in the 1970s. The break (signaled most adamantly in Reich’s essay “An End to
Electronics”)38 was partly precipitated by events (both personal and composi-
tional) during 1966 that had caused the composer to feel “like a mad scientist
trapped in a lab.”39 Turning in the 1980s toward a different technology in the
form of the personal computer, Reich began to explore the capabilities of digital
technology as a tool for score preparation: a kind of invisible assistant. Although
Reich started working with the computers, he still maintained his newly estab-
lished relationship with tradition.
Fittingly, Electric Counterpoint was one of Reich’s first works to incorpo-
rate music notation software (MNS) as a compositional tool, specifically the
software program Professional Composer. During the years between Vermont
Counterpoint and Electric Counterpoint, he actively explored possibilities for
printing music from a mechanized source. As was the case for many professional
composers, music copying was both time-consuming and expensive for Reich.
For The Desert Music (1983), according to a story related to Peter Catapano,
Reich had received a commission of $15,000 for the work, but the copyist’s fees
totaled $17,000.40 It was three years before Reich took the next logical step in his
digital development—the acquisition of an Apple IIC for his son in 1986. This
personal purchase led Reich to consider the possibilities of MNS. By 1987, he
had purchased a Macintosh Plus and was using it in conjunction with Mark of
the Unicorn’s (MOTU) notation software Professional Composer and MOTU’s
related software sequencer, Performer.41 Ten years after adopting the computer
as a compositional tool, Reich recalled that he “found both programs to be a
tremendous practical help, especially in preparing parts,” noting that they were
“extracted automatically from the score.”42
The impact of MNS on the working methods of composers during the
last two decades of the twentieth century has only started to be explored. In
addressing the ways in which such software transforms the work environment
of a composer, Chris Watson has asked what comprises contemporary composi-
tional tools, positing the argument that the physicality of MNS, housed as they
are inside the computer, lies in opposition to the cultivated Romantic ideal of
the composer:

The historically acculturated romance and simplicity of the chair and desk,
the quill, ink well and manuscript is gone, replaced by the plastic of the CPU,
screen, keyboard and mouse. The enduring nature of the Romantic ideal
renders such notions as the members of the First Viennese School ordering
Sibelius software upgrades via e-mail, or meeting at drinking houses to discuss
248 Reich Revisited

RAM requirements for the rendering of WAV files as absurd. Musicology offers
no depictions of Bach chatting with his patrons via Skype, Brahms hunting for
a wireless router at his local Dick Smith or Webern hiking in the alps with his
iPod.43

In the 1980s, many of the circumstances described by Watson were still situations
that belonged to the future. Composers were not yet communicating with their
sponsors through online real-time video programs. However, they were begin-
ning to grasp the capabilities of computers, hardware, and software. MNS was
new and innovative; Reich was testing it out and even by 1996 (several years
after acquiring it) was still enamored with the concept, commenting that he
“would be quite surprised if, in less than five years, most young composers were
not generating their scores via computer.”44
Professional Composer provided Reich with several compositional benefits,
in addition to the possibility of reducing copying fees. The software was
advertised to musicians, composers, and arrangers as “an end to messy scores,
illegible sketches, and time-consuming copying,” encouraging them to “im-
agine an efficient musical assistant who not only copies beautifully, but also
performs lengthy tasks like transposition, part extraction, and a multitude of
score formatting and printing jobs—a smart assistant who knows all instrument
ranges and checks for errors in your score.”45 Such lengthy tasks that could be
taken over by the composer’s invisible software assistant can be found in the
“Variations” menu of Professional Composer, which, for example, provides six
interesting possibilities for transpositions and rhythms:
1. Transpose Parts
2. Transpose Key . . .
3. Transpose Interval . . .
4. Rebar
5. Change Rhythm . . .
6. Merge Staves (command-M)
A selection of these six transformational tools appear to have been utilized
in Reich’s e-sketches for Electric Counterpoint, demonstrating his exploration
of the software’s capabilities although not necessarily an expansion of them.
Reich still holds on to the traditional notion that the musical idea should
precede the use of technology, be it on a computer or via a specialized tape
recorder.46
Ostensibly, according to the Professional Composer user manual the trans-
position tools were easy and convenient to apply and reverse.47 However, in a
contemporary review of the software, Elaine Cousins notes that early versions
were not without flaws. She comments that the “Transpose Interval” com-
mand could “only carry out exact intervallic transposition,” meaning that if the
Steve Reich’s Counterpoints and Computers 249

user wanted, for example, to retain the original key signature of the fragment
undergoing transposition, she or he “would have to make that adjustment on
a note-by-note basis after the transposition was completed.”48 Cousins’s com-
mentary on Professional Composer confirms Alan Belkin’s understanding of
the difficult nature of MNS development, drawn from the fact that “music no-
tation is only partly rule-based; it has a visual, aesthetic aspect that is often
difficult to reduce to simple algorithmic form.”49 As MNS is predicated on the
software designers’ ability to convert the visual element of a score into the
command lines of a programming language, the success of such a translation
requires reducing the “psychic friction” between what the user intends and
what is actually realized.50
What becomes apparent in Cousins’s review is that by the mid-1980s
Professional Composer had a higher level of psychic friction than was desirable,
a situation that continued to plague software designers. This concern is evident
in Belkin’s reviews of a range of similar MNS packages from ten years later, where
he expounds on the difficulties early programmers continued to experience in
balancing flexibility versus functionality.51 For example, the “Merge Staves” fea-
ture in Professional Composer software was not only located in the “Variations”
menu but was additionally possible for a composer to achieve through the key-
board shortcut command-M. The “Merge Staves” tool, like the very methods of
applying it, again offered a time-efficient option for a previously labor-intensive
task, namely, combining “two or more single staves together.”52
Reich’s use of the features located in the “Variations” menu is found in two
of the remaining loose pages of sketch material, somewhat surprisingly in hard
copy rather than in a digital format. The pair of documents, “First Resulting
Patterns,” from July 12, 1987, and “Resulting Patterns,” dated July 18, 1987,
illustrate Reich’s “auditioning” of resulting patterns for the first movement
of Electric Counterpoint.53 Both pages consist of sixteen staves, the top ten
of which are computer-generated, presumably from Professional Composer
files.54 Lines 9 and 10 (the bottom two computer-generated staves) on both
documents comprise a composite of lines 1 through 4, and lines 5 through 8,
respectively. Lines 9 and 10 are most likely the result of Reich taking advantage
of the “Merge Staves” option. Visually, the composite staff appears cluttered
and messy, with all four printed lines appearing one on top of the other. Further
confusing the lines are rests that overlap with notated pitches. According to
the Professional Composer manual, for the rests not to appear in the merged
staff—overly complicating the score—they “would need to be invisified in
order to obtain the desired result.”55
This additional step appears not to have been undertaken, and the visual con-
fusion that accompanies these documents is therefore most likely a by-product
of using the software as a sketching tool rather than for typesetting a score. The
adoption of compositional tools made possible by MNS to increase the software’s
250 Reich Revisited

efficacy does not suggest that technological determinism held sway at this point
in Reich’s compositional practice.56 Indeed, a similar approach may be found in
earlier Reich sketches. For example, from very early on in Vermont Counterpoint
(an entirely paper-based composition), Reich compresses multiple flute lines
into a single staff in order to form the resulting live flute line.57 More recently,
Reich has described his workspace as a blend of the analog and digital notation
styles: “I still use my music notebooks to work out the basic harmonies . . . [the
notebooks are] sitting right on top of my electric keyboard by my computer, so
I’m back and forth with all of that.”58
The first instance of such “back and forth” procedures found in the ex-
tant sketch materials for Electric Counterpoint are the half-computer, half-
handwritten documents described earlier in this chapter. In both documents,
lines 1 through 4 and 9 are the same, the differences in the pages stem from
variations that occur in lines 5 through 8 and the corresponding resulting line
10. It is in the later section where Reich experimented with other software-aided
tools, such as the three forms of transposition outline offered in the “Variations”
menu. This idea of experimentation aligns with the fact that lines 5 and 6 were
scribbled out on the earlier document “First Resulting Patterns.”
Possible remnants of the other options available in the “Variations” menu
can be found in the early electronic MNS documents for Electric Counterpoint.
Between e-documents titled “African horn polyphonie” and “horn polyphonie”
(see Table 11.2 for dates of creation and modification), the option of “Change
Rhythm . . .” may have been applied, while between “horn polyphonie” and “short
horn polyphonie” the “Transpose Key . . .” option in Professional Composer was
likely utilized. As with the “Merge Staves” feature, these automations within the
software didn’t create a new style of music: rather, they increased Reich’s effi-
ciency for composing in an already established aesthetic.

Table 11.2 Comparison of select early Electric Counterpoint computer files

File Created Modified Metrical Length Key
Division (Bars) Signature
Date Time Date Time

African May 10 14:17:24 May 14 19:33:31 Sixteenth 8 C major

horn notes
polyphonie
horn May 14 20:30:20 May 15 02:09:08 Quarter 16 C major
polyphonie notes
short horn June 30 14:06:41 June 30 14:25:58 Quarter 16 G major
polyphonie notes

Derived from Electric Counterpoint computer files (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).
Steve Reich’s Counterpoints and Computers 251

Another feature of Professional Composer was its ability to provide play-

back of the inputted notation. While composing Electric Counterpoint, Reich
could utilize the MNS of Professional Composer in conjunction with the se-
quencer software of Performer, enabling him to listen back to melodic ideas
almost instantaneously. In his e-journals—a digital diary of text files that ac-
company the MNS e-sketches—Reich not only jotted down ideas and tracked
his progress through the composition but also referred to other digital
sketches, both Professional Composer and Performer documents. This is ev-
ident midway through the composition of Electric Counterpoint when Reich
made notes to himself, such as on August 25, “Just to remember-paste in se-
quence P-Live+7etc (40-73) to sequence. Then go back to Print score and enter
it in and print.”59 By utilizing this feature of Professional Composer, Reich was
effectively recreating a digital equivalent of his earlier working methods, when
he would engage performers in his ensemble to create rough recordings of
sketch material for him.60 This practice has continued to the present day, where
computer or tape demos are presented to performers in advance in order to
maximize rehearsal time.61
In the 1980s, Reich was not creating his own computer-triggered musical
instruments or programming his own software:  he was simply utilizing the
products available on the market to his own ends.62 His compositional quandary
(expensive copyist’s fees) was old enough, but his solution—a personal com-
puter along with accompanying software packages—was creative yet relatively
uncontroversial. Perceptions of the composer’s technological conservatism
would change only beginning with his use of sampling keyboards in Different
Trains (1988) and beyond, whereby he was said to both come “full circle [by re-
turning to] the use of taped speech” and yet “[offering] something completely
new and unique.”63

Conclusion: Reich’s New Beginning

In the 1980s, Steve Reich bid farewell to his early period of hardcore min-
imalism and reinvented himself in the image of the composers he had first
encountered in William Austin’s music history class. To this end, he adapted
traditional terminology to fit his stylistic predilections rather than inventing
new jargon. This shift also coincided with Reich’s gradual acceptance into the
canon of Western art music. In the early 1990s, when his position in that canon
was fairly secure, Reich admitted that in the late 1970s he had already realized
the need to return to more conventional ensembles.64 Traveling with large num-
bers of musicians was not always a financially viable—let alone sustainable—
enterprise, and surely this was increasingly the case over the course of the
inflationary 1970s and recessionary 1980s.65 Pragmatically, Reich needed to
252 Reich Revisited

adapt to the orthodoxy of the orchestra, augmenting his compositional output

when opportunities presented themselves with multitracked string quartets and
solo virtuosi.66 In the 1980s, Reich shied away from the image of a composer
keen to promote his “outsider” status. Like his adaptation of traditional termi-
nology to describe his music post–Music for 18 Musicians, Reich used what
was available to him rather than seeking to create something new. His rever-
sion to the status quo—reflected in critics’ responses and the composer’s own
use of more conventional language to describe his music—mirrors the rather
conventional use of computer technology with MNS. Electric Counterpoint’s
e-sketches suggest that Reich “had an idea and used . . . technology to realize
that idea.”67
But do Reich’s traditionalist musical rhetoric and use of notation software
in the 1980s relate to one another in a more thoroughgoing way, beyond their
temporal confluence and mutual conventionality? I would argue that there are
three possible ways to understand this, all of which are bound up with economic
problems emerging from the period in US history and the composer’s life. First,
as suggested earlier, MNS permitted a new efficiency in his creative practice,
which may have enabled greater productivity when he was faced with the need
to manage large commissions and, perhaps, new expenses encumbered in part
by the birth of his son Ezra in 1978.68 Second, on a purely practical level MNS
helped Reich and his virtuoso soloists create prerecorded tape-loop ensembles
for performers of the Counterpoints, and thereby helped to manage the squeeze
on expenses generated by larger performing ensembles, which Reich could
not afford to maintain during the 1980s unless working with established
commissioning ensembles.69 Third, and more speculatively, as an early adopter
of MNS, Reich may have unwittingly contributed to the downsizing of the music
publishing industry, which increasingly required composers to use such soft-
ware applications to reduce editing, copying, and printing costs. In all cases,
what becomes “conservative” about the 1980s for Reich are the contradictory
economic circumstances that he experienced—increased personal economic
stability placed against the need for new logistical considerations in relation to
independently organized projects.
As can be seen from this chapter’s review of the Counterpoint pieces during
the 1980s, an examination of these works shows them to be more than friv-
olous concert pieces. Their significance lies in their facilitation of a shift in
the composer’s self-portrayal, creating a new beginning from old ideas, and
perhaps their indexing of wider socioeconomic shifts in the period of their
composition.70 The 1980s saw Reich standardize aspects of his compositional
career which, when combined with his musical efforts, projected the concept
of a conventional composer—one who celebrated the traditional historical
antecedents of the Counterpoints—and the exploration of the capacities of the
personal computer.
Steve Reich’s Counterpoints and Computers 253

Notes

1. For a brief description of Nonesuch’s recording practices, see Shorto 2004.

2. Reich 2002b, 51–52 [“Some Optimistic Predictions (1970) about the Future
of Music”].
3. Keith Potter does not cover the 1980s in his work, and Schwarz skips over
the Counterpoints in any meaningful way (see Schwarz 1996; Potter 2000).
4. Reich, quoted in Steve Reich: A New Musical Language (1987b; directed by
Margaret Williams).
5. Reich 1988, 273.
6. Cello Counterpoint is not considered in this chapter, which focuses on the
works from the 1980s.
7. Freeman 2012, 373, 375, 377–78.
8. Schwarz 1996, 82.
9. A version of this story appears in Reich 2002b, 203.
10. Reich, quoted in Raines 2015, 21.
11. Sandow 1982.
12. Sandow 1986.
13. Gann 1987.
14. Schwarz 1990, 246.
15. Reich, quoted in Nyman 1977, 19.
16. Reich 1974, vii.
17. Reich 2002b, 119.
18. Cameron 1985, 435.
19. Reich 1974, 50.
20. Reich 1982.
21. Reich, quoted in Strickland 1991, 35.
22. Reich 2011a, 1980b.
23. Reich 1985.
24. Reich 2002b, 119.
25. The term “rhythmic construction,” which is used here, is equivalent to
Warburton’s “block additive process”; however, the idea of “construction” derives
from Reich’s own terminology and is used by Schwarz. As early as Drumming
(1971), Reich was already referring to the substitution of notes for rests as a form
of construction, and the opposite (rests being substituted for notes) as reduction.
See Schwarz 1990, 251; Warburton 1988, 148; Reich 2002b, 64–65 [“Drumming
(1971)”].
26. Reich, quoted in Warren 2010.
27. Cited in Strickland 1991, 36.
28. Gagne and Caras 1982, 313–16; Strickland 1991, 35–36. In interviews
conducted during the 1980s and 1990s, Reich often referred to his studies with
Austin. The section on Reich’s experience with Austin at Cornell is edited out of the
Fanfare version of this interview that was published in the same year the interview
took place (1987); see Strickland 1987; Duckworth 1999, 310.
254 Reich Revisited

29. J. Schneider 1991, 5–6.

30. Sketchbook [24] (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).
31. Potter, Gann, and ap Siôn 2013, 2.
32. Walsh 1982, 60; K. Smith, 2012. One might charitably describe the Carnegie
Hall performance, which took place on January 18, 1973, as a concert that elicited a
widely varied reception. For more on this concert, see Sumanth Gopinath’s chapter
in this volume.
33. The series was launched in 1981 by the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey
Lichtenstein; see “BAM | Next Wave Festival.”
34. Page 1986.
35. Holland 1987.
36. Gann 1987.
37. Page 1986; Jepson 1988.
38. Reich 2002b, 38–51 [“The Phase Shifting Pulse Gate – Four Organs – Phase
Patterns – An End to Electronics (1968–70)”].
39. Reich, quoted in Nyman 1971, 230.
40. Catapano 2007.
41. Reich 1996, 19. The dating of Reich’s use of MOTU’s Professional Composer
and Performer is confirmed in the extant sketch materials for the composition of
Electric Counterpoint (1987), housed as part of the Steve Reich Collection at the PSS.
42. Reich 1996, 19.
43. Watson 2006, 111.
44. Reich 1996, 19.
45. MOTU n.d.
46. Raines 2015, 23.
47. MOTU 1985, 137–38.
48. Cousins 1985, 11.
49. Belkin 1994, 53.
50. Crawford 2009, 61.
51. Belkin 1994, 68. A more generic discussion of the peculiarities of the effects
Human Computer Interaction (HCI) might have on compositional approach and
practice can be found in Nash and Blackwell 2014.
52. MOTU 1985, 138.
53. Electric Counterpoint Folders, Steve Reich Collection, PSS.
54. Unfortunately, the exact configurations found in these printouts are not pre-
sent in any of the accessible existing Electric Counterpoint Professional Composer
digital files at the PSS.
55. MOTU 1985, 85.
56. Technological determinism as defined by Williams 1990, 12–14.
57. Sketchbooks [24], 60 and 87 (Steve Reich Collection, PSS). Note that the
first sketch identified as relating to Vermont Counterpoint begins on page  51 of
Sketchbook 24.
58. Raines 2015, 24.
59. “Note Book –Elect. Cntrpnt.txt,” Electric Counterpoint computer files (Steve
Reich Collection, PSS).
Steve Reich’s Counterpoints and Computers 255

60. This can be seen in comments about recording and listening found, for
example, at the bottom of Sketchbook 25, page  3; at the top of Sketchbook 25,
page 14; on the right side of Sketchbook 25, page 30. Sketchbook [25] (Steve Reich
Collection, PSS).
61. Raines 2015, 24.
62. In this way, Reich’s practice reflects realities in the shift from analog to dig-
ital technologies, which “differ greatly in the scope they allow for consumer appro-
priation” (Perlman 2003, 352), the latter being much less easy to modify without
advanced technical knowledge. One might think of musicians’ reliance on preset
sounds (rather than user-programmed ones) during the contemporaneous era of
early digital synthesizer keyboards. As Paul Théberge notes, “As instrument tech-
nology became increasingly complex during the early 1980s (Yamaha’s popular DX7
is often cited as a case in point) and programming more difficult, the suspicion that
most users simply did not program became even stronger. By the end of the decade,
marketing departments were estimating that as few as 10  percent of users pro-
grammed their own sounds” (1997, 75). For his part, Reich likens MNS to a “word
processing program” (2002b, 201).
63. Paul Hillier, in Reich 2002b, 6.
64. J. Schneider 1991, 5.
65. Another factor was surely the physical wear and tear of touring on the
aging composer. In an interview from 1983, he implied this in the following
comments: “Look, if you write music, as opposed to simply playing it, then you’re
aligning yourself with a certain western tradition of notation, and music which will
hopefully survive in its notated form. As I got past 40, and up next to 50, the idea of
travelling around the world with my ensemble got less and less interesting to them
as well as me. I’ve travelled with 2000 pounds of equipment and up to 24 musicians,
and now my wanderlust is down to sub-zero. I just have to travel to make a living. So
sending my music out in other ways is a relief ” (Morgan 1983, 6).
66. Retrospectively, Reich has noted in an interview that the nature of working
with orchestras was somewhat depressing: “I am spending a year on this piece and
the musicians are looking at their watches—they want to get home to Brooklyn . . . it’s
their obligation to the living art of our time or some other boring phrase—and you
feel that. . . . Also I am devoted to the microphone. . . . And the orchestras are still
treating it like, ‘Oh my god, he’s using a microphone! It’s the end of the world!’ ” (see
A. Ford 1993, 65).
67. Raines 2015, 23.
68. For example, one could argue that the labor of producing a canon become
partly automated via Reich’s embracing of notation and playback software, thereby
replacing the kind of precompositional thinking and requirements involved in canon
composition in favor of a brute-force “guess-and-check” method. It is clear, however,
that Reich’s method was to move back and forth between paper and computer—to
use the latter to verify the results of the former (and, perhaps, vice versa). One might
even productively draw an analogy here between Reich’s approach and the use of
counterpoint in the music of the Second Viennese School, especially Schoenberg.
Discussing Schoenberg’s atonal canons and other contrapuntal techniques, Richard
256 Reich Revisited

Taruskin has argued, “But how elaborately ‘worked out’ is a canon or a fugue that
is written in a style that recognises no distinction between consonance and disso-
nance, so that harmonically speaking, literally anything goes? The essence of coun-
terpoint has always been its ‘dissonance treatment.’ That, and that alone, is where
skill is required and displayed. What makes Bach’s Musical offering or Art of fugue
such astonishing tours de force is not just the complexity of the texture, but the
fact that that complexity is achieved within such exacting harmonic constraints.
Take away the constraints and you have rendered the tour de force entirely point-
less” (2004, 27). Whether one could apply the same argument in relation to Reich’s
pandiatonicism is debatable, but there surely lies some truth in the notion that the
musical material became, in a sense, preordained and fetishized by using computer
technology. Whether this trend continued with more elaborate later works such as
Different Trains and The Cave (1993), which were also composed with early versions
of MNS, might prove a fruitful area for future research. Certainly, Reich’s engage-
ment with technology demonstrates a decisive change from the man who had previ-
ously developed, created, and eventually rejected the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate. For
more on the latter, see Kerry O’Brien’s chapter in this volume.
69. When discussing the constraints affecting the composition of his Sextet
(1984), Reich noted, “I felt—it’s the 80s, there are a lot of economic considerations
going on. People want us to play but they are not going to hire 18 people. I need
a new piece for a small part of my ensemble.” In Reich 1987a, 106. The tapes also
offered new revenue opportunities for Reich’s publisher, Boosey & Hawkes (which
he joined in 1983 after publishing several early scores with Universal Edition in
1980; see Potter 2000, 353–54nn54, 55), and perhaps for the composer himself.
70. A study of Philip Glass’s reinvention of himself in the middle to late 1980s
provides an interesting parallel for a greater understanding of the cultural climate in
which these composers found themselves (see Grimshaw 2002).
PART IV
BEYOND THE WEST

Africa and Asia

12

Afro-Electric Counterpoint

Martin Scherzinger

Introduction: Occidental Africa

As it is with most schools of artistic and musical thought, “minimalism” has

become a trope in the collective awareness of the West, which transcends the
actual works that—in their incoherent variety—it claims to represent.* More a
conceptual condition than an empirical reality, the idea of minimalism tends to
contain the logical and conceptual grasp of historical accounts of its various rep-
resentatives. It is a tribute to a composer such as Steve Reich, albeit of a some-
what backhanded sort, that he should be eclipsed by the discourse surrounding
his creations. This is especially paradoxical in the context of music that aspires
to a condition of autogenerative immediacy, shorn of extramusical structure,
content, and narrative; a music, in the words of Reich in 1968, where “compo-
sitional process and sounding music are one and the same thing.”1 Statements
such as these became ubiquitous in a host of then-contemporary concert
programs, commentaries, programmatic statements, manifesto-like slogans,
and both critical and promotional reviews. Through a kind of mimetic cultural
information transfer, a scholarly literature on minimalism that was primarily
guided by a series of stylistic traits of this sort then emerged. In the decades
that followed, these solidified into commonplace ideas—a tradition. Authorial
noninterference, nonrepresentation, anti-illusion, flat surface, all-over pattern,
repetitive structure, prevalent modularity, reduction of means, depersonalized
processes: these were all informal but permanent hallmarks of an aesthetic style,
an artistic movement, and a historical moment.
The myth of minimalism prospered in a particular cultural and technolog-
ical environment, primarily on the basis of a tacit set of contracts between visual
artists, critics, historians, and musicians about how a new form of cultural pro-
duction in the 1960s might be represented. The social, aesthetic, and institu-
tional imbrication of a musical practice in the creative production of various
artists (such as Sol LeWitt, Frank Stella, Michael Snow, and Richard Serra), as

* This chapter has benefited enormously from conversations with Kofi Agawu, Rick
Cohn, Evelyne Diendorf, Akin Euba, Sumanth Gopinath, Sabine Hänggi-Stampfli,
Russell Hartenberger, Matthias Kassel, David Locke, Justin London, Robert Morris,
Ulrich Mosch, John Roeder, Heidy Zimmermann, and many others.

259
260 Beyond the West

well as the writings of contemporary critics (such as Barbara Rose, Michael

Fried, Richard Wollheim, Susan Sontag, Tom Johnson, and Michael Nyman),
produced a public discourse on musical minimalism derived primarily from
features associated with minimalism in the visual arts of the 1950s and 1960s.
What this critical literature shields from view is the constitutive role
played by audible cultures of the non-West in shaping the distinctive sound
of minimalism. Reich’s connection to African music, in particular, is exten-
sive. Arguably, the composer’s entire oeuvre stems from an interpretation of
the complex counterpoint and pulse-dominated percussion of West African
drumming ensembles. According to the official story—articulated by primary
texts on the subject as well as the composer himself—in the early 1960s Reich
studied African music by way of an encounter with Arthur M. Jones’s seminal
book, Studies in African Music, which contains extensive transcriptions of West
African drumming styles. During this time, the composer corresponded with
Jones and took lessons in New York with the master drummer Alfred Ladzekpo.
Then, in the summer of 1970, Reich spent five weeks in Accra, Ghana, on a
study grant from the Institute of International Education. He took lessons with
Gideon Alorworye at the Institute of African Studies (University of Ghana)
and recorded, extensively transcribed, and analyzed his lessons. In the con-
text of his own music, Reich attempted to go beyond an “exotic” invocation of
African sound and instead to engage its formal structures.2 Drumming (1971)
was one result of this attempt. Other examples of music from this period in-
clude Clapping Music (1972), Music for Pieces of Wood (1973), and Music for 18
Musicians (1976), all of which deploy undisguised appropriations of rhythmic
patterns of West African drum ensembles.
Less officially, however, Reich’s involvement with African music extends well
beyond this often-repeated story, which marks only one African region, and
also routinely underplays the scope and type of influence, construed as mostly
“confirmation and encouragement” for an already formed style.3 In 1988, Reich
stated that

the influence of . . . Africa on my composition was more in the nature of en-

couragement than change of direction. Since I  had composed the formative
works in my style (It’s Gonna Rain, Come Out, Piano Phase, Violin Phase, etc.)
in the 1960s prior to going to Ghana in 1970, my trip there basically confirmed
the direction I was already going in.4

Against this oft-repeated idea, this chapter will show that Reich’s composi-
tional endeavor reflects less the “confirmation” or “encouragement” of an ex-
isting idea than a thoroughgoing debt to African musical thought. In other
words, far from coinciding with some previous experimental proclivity (“in
[Reich’s] style . . . Piano Phase, Violin Phase, etc.”) that happened to share char-
acteristics with African music, as maintained by the composer, the music is in
Afro-Electric Counterpoint 261

fact directly indebted—at its core and in its origins—to African musical princi-
ples, concepts, and techniques.
The principles, concepts, and techniques at stake here are too numerous to
be outlined comprehensively in this chapter. Instead, to turn the analytic ta-
bles, I will outline only a few of the foundational principles of Reich’s work and
demonstrate their source in African musical practice and thought. These in-
clude the “phasing process” that grounds perhaps the most fundamental op-
eration of Reich’s compositional modus operandi no less than the concept of
“inherent rhythm,” perhaps the most noteworthy sonic-aesthetic feature (and
central compositional preoccupation) of Reich’s entire musical oeuvre. Both of
these principles were amply elaborated in the then-contemporary writings on
African music with which Reich was well acquainted before embarking on his
first signature minimalist work. For example, Reich derived the “phasing pro-
cess” with reference to music of the Bemba and the Lala people of Zambia—a
then-colonial territory known as Northern Rhodesia—about which he read in
various anthropological accounts. In a letter to A. M. Jones in 1967 (currently
archived at the Paul Sacher Stiftung [PSS] in Basel, Switzerland), Reich states
that he had encountered Jones’s book Studies in African Music already in 1962.
Close reading of Reich’s writings actually reveals his acknowledgment of the
origin of the phasing idea in his studies of African music. With a hint of under-
statement, he writes, for example, that “seeing the book of African transcriptions
by A. M. Jones undoubtedly helped prepare me to take a strong interest in the
phasing process.”5 Reich states that Jones’s analyses of the phasing process in
African music offered a “radically different way of making music,” which fur-
thermore “suggested the multiple simultaneous tape loops [he] was beginning
to experiment with at the time.”6 In fact, even the earliest tape pieces were in-
itially crafted to reflect an African phasing process, in the manner laid out by
Jones. In other words, far from discovering and then crafting a gradual process
produced by subtle mechanical inaccuracies, Jones’s transcriptions of phased
rhythmic relationships in the second volume of Studies in African Music laid
the groundwork for the canon formations in the tape pieces. The fact that the
tape loops gradually went further out of phase was a secondary (albeit tempo-
rarily productive) techno-mechanical glitch. I demonstrate this prior connec-
tion with African musical practice in an article on the production of Reich’s It’s
Gonna Rain:
[Nearly] all commentators on Reich’s early tape pieces do not notice the fact
that Reich specifically aimed to set up the tape loops in It’s Gonna Rain in
a particular Africanized phase relationship. Following Jones’s account of
drumming from West and Central Africa, Reich writes, “My first thought was
to play one loop against itself in some particular relationship, since some of my
previous pieces had dealt with two or more identical instruments playing the
same notes against each other”. Reich clarifies what he means later in the same
262 Beyond the West

essay, “I had intended to make a specific relationship: ‘It’s gonna’ on one loop

against ‘rain’ on the other. Instead, the two machines happened to be lined
up in unison and one of them gradually started to get ahead of the other”.
After 1971 Reich would return to this more precisely African compositional
practice, employing notched, instead of sliding, phase relationships in the con-
text of quoted fragments of African music in Clapping Music (1972), Music for
Pieces of Wood (1973), and Six Pianos (1972).7
Further evidence for Reich’s use of African musical models for his early tape
pieces emerges in sometimes unexpected places—and sometimes even where
the explicit focus is not primarily on African influence. For example, Reich is
emphatic about his early acquaintance with African music when the question
arises as to who of the early minimalists—Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and
so on—first invented phasing. In the context of an antagonism between Reich
and Riley, Reich demonstrates that he had independently arrived at the idea in
the following terms:
I ordered [Studies in African Music] from Oxford University Press, which was
a big commitment in those days. Basically, what I saw was repeating patterns
in 12/8 or subdivisions of 12/8 superimposed so that their downbeats do not
coincide. This was before I  met Terry. I  had the ingredients:  African music,
Coltrane, tape loops, and Jr. Walker.8
In keeping with his recollection elsewhere that he obtained Jones’s book
in 1962, Reich here uses his encounter with disaligned downbeats in African
music as evidence that he did not derive the phasing idea from Riley at the
San Francisco Tape Center. Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to
describe the full extent of Reich’s involvement with the African phasing idea,
I will return repeatedly, and not insignificantly, to some of the precise loci of his
derivations of the idea in specific African musical contexts. Here, I wish only to
draw attention to the overwhelming presence—already in his earliest works—of
the phasing idea in general.
As mentioned earlier, additional examples of borrowed African principles,
concepts, and techniques abound, but, in the interests of brevity, I will focus here
only on the second fundamental musical idea characterizing Reich’s musical
oeuvre—the concept of “inherent rhythm.” The origin of this idea is perhaps less
obviously associated with African music, especially if measured by its wholesale
absence from the literature addressing cross-cultural referents in the works of
Reich. I will therefore discuss this concept in a little more detail than the phasing
process and will describe its adoption by Reich in various contexts. It would not
be an exaggeration to say that not only did Reich’s work become a capacious
conduit for inherent rhythm formations, but these formations practically define
the central phenomenology of his basic aesthetics. Although he claims to have
discovered the phenomenon himself in 1967 (dubbed a “resultant pattern” in the
composer’s lexicon), the concept is an explicitly African musical one. Reich in
Afro-Electric Counterpoint 263

fact closely studied the phenomenon of inherent rhythms in ethnographic texts

and transcriptions of African music. There are various references to this kind of
concept in writings he encountered in the 1960s. In Jones’s The Icila Dance: Old
Style (published in 1952), the ethnographer’s informant L.  Kombe describes
the counting process between handclapping parts and the Icibitiku drum of the
Icila dance as a “resultant rhythm.”9 Alternatively, in Studies in African Music
(published in 1959), we find a reference to the “typological features” of African
music, such as short rhythmic patterns, that are “inherent in the very music
itself.”10 These references in Jones’s published work notwithstanding, Reich
also encountered the inherent rhythm idea through a different ethnographic
source—the early English-language writings of the Viennese ethnomusicologist
Gerhard Kubik. Kubik coined the technical term “inherent rhythm” to capture
a prominent feature of south, east, and central African instrumental music, par-
ticularly likembe, zither, harp, lyre, and xylophone music.11 In 1962, the ethno-
musicologist described these gestalt-like phenomena as “inherent or subjective
rhythms,” but—given their prominent additional melodic component—he later
changed the term to “inherent pattern.”12
The concept refers to the audible appearance of melodic-rhythmic lines that
are not under the direct supervision of the motor actions of performers that
produce them. In some cases, these seemingly phantom patterns are given a
name, and even emphasized (via doubling) by specialist performers. In the sty-
listics of Kigandan Amadinda music, for example, two parts (known as Okunaga
and Okwawula) are set forth by two or more performers known as Omunazi and
Omwawuzi, who stand opposite one another and beat out interlocking phrases
of different lengths reaching between two hundred and six hundred pulses per
minute. The weaving of Okunaga and Okwawula creates a new basic struc-
ture that is engaged by a third performer (known as the Omukonezi) to draw
out an inherent line embedded in the low register of the polyphonic texture.
Kubik has argued that the crucial ingredients for the successful emergence of in-
herent melodic-rhythmic patterns derive from the basic structure of the musical
module—it should exhibit largely spaced intervals with considerable overlap be-
tween parts, for example. When these modules are played at high speed with
a smooth (unaccented) approach to the key strikes, the performers bring the
array of notes into proximity without soliciting default metric entrainments. The
mostly asymmetric inherent line that emerges in the bass notes is then doubled
at the octave by the Omukonezi, who is seated on the verso end of the xylo-
phone. The doubled inherent pattern is designated in Lugandan as Okukonera.
Kubik’s early ethnographic engagement with Lugandan music offers detailed
descriptions of this gestalt-like psychological phenomenon. The ethnographer
recalls this discovery in 1959 in connection with the compositions of Evaristo
Muyinda: when combining individual tone-rows of an Amadinda composition
in interlocking style, “there would emerge a puzzle of melodic-rhythmic lines,
crisscrossing one another, which we had not played.”13 Kubik credits the African
264 Beyond the West

musicologist Joseph Kyagambiddwa with an early description of the hallucina-

tory appearance of okukonera as a “voice” that “mysteriously looms up” in his
book African Music from the Source of the Nile in 1959. The ethnographer then
elaborates the idea, by describing them as indirect polyphonic lines, like thrown
voices—“as if the spirit were talking.”14
An engagement with east, central, and southern African music has not yet
registered in writings on Reich’s music, and yet this component of his engage-
ment with Africa is perhaps the foundational feature of his basic compositional
endeavor. Kubik’s English-language publications of the 1950s and 1960s in
African Music:  Journal of the African Music Society were available to Reich at
most institutionalized American libraries, including the Cornell University li-
brary, where he studied with William Austin in the 1950s, and with whom he
remained in contact in the 1960s. Furthermore, the sketches, letters, and notes,
held at PSS, amply reveal Reich’s considerable interest in these musical regions
and an almost fanatical interest in the xylophone music of southern Africa
long before his trip to Ghana. For example, in a letter written by Reich to A. M.
Jones on June 5, 1967, Reich gratefully acknowledges the contribution of Jones’s
African music studies to his own musical education and then requests both
recordings of the music notated in volume 2 of Studies in African Music and
tapes of African music of a similar timbre, notably unaccompanied African xy-
lophone music. In Jones’s reply to Reich, dated June 16, 1967, the anthropologist
instantly detects the link between Reich’s Piano Phase (a tape of which he had
included in his correspondence with Jones) and Gerhard Kubik’s transcriptions
of Ugandan xylophone music, as discussed earlier in the chapter.
Interestingly, Jones suggests in his letter to Reich that, instead of using
African source material, Reich should consider using conventional classical
music, such as Mendelssohn or Mozart, to write music with staggered bar lines.
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to describe either the precise details of the
PSS archive—the various references to “African xylophones” in Reich’s compo-
sitional sketches in the 1960s, and so forth—or to give a comprehensive account
of the ways these African stylistics and sounds take up considerable residency
in Reich’s general compositional practice.15 For the purposes of this argument, it
is crucial to note only that Reich applied the “inherent pattern” idea, and other
African conceptualizations of time, already in his earliest works, at least five
years before his short trip to Ghana in 1970.16
The relevance of the African inherent pattern idea to Reich’s compositional
aesthetics, amply described in his writings, cannot be overstated. He credits
the production of “resultant patterns” in his music, for example, as the pri-
mary source of the perceptual “mysteries” for the listener; these are the “im-
personal, unintended, psychoacoustic by-products of the intended process.”17
The “mysteries” that emerged as “unintended psychoacoustic by-products” of
Reich’s “resultant patterns” of 1968 are precisely modeled on the “puzzle of
melodic-rhythmic lines, crisscrossing one another, which [were] not played,”
Afro-Electric Counterpoint 265

of the Kigandan “inherent patterns” discovered by Kubik in 1959. As with the

phasing idea, this African principle is explicitly explored in It’s Gonna Rain
(1965), Come Out (1966), Piano Phase (1967), and Violin Phase (1967). In Violin
Phase, which deploys a module derived from Ghanaian (instead of Ugandan)
music, Reich actually adds another violin part to double an inherent pattern
produced by multiple patterns in a phasing process, thereby imitating more
precisely than in the three previous works the African performance practice of
the Omukonezi. This is the inherent melodic line known in the Lugandan lan-
guage as Okukonera. As it is for the Amadinda, the phantom-like appearance
of inherent patterns is a crucial experiential property of Reich’s music. In the
context of Violin Phase, Reich writes: “When I say there is more in my music
than what I  put there, I  primarily mean these resulting patterns.”18 Not only
does inherent pattern formation play a prominent role in every Reich compo-
sition to follow these early works, but the playing technique associated with
inherent rhythms also influenced additional matters of performance. Sketches
housed at the PSS, for example, reveal that even the positioning of marimba
players on opposite sides of the same instrument in Drumming draws its in-
spiration from the Amadinda performance tradition. For the purposes of this
argument, however, I wish only to draw attention to the fact that Reich’s de-
ployment and self-proclaimed invention of the illusionist phenomenon of “re-
sultant patterns” owes its origins directly to sonic communicative conventions
in Africa, with strong associations to rituals of spirit possession practiced in
Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Uganda. African sounds of biomedical communica-
tion are thereby transplanted, translated, and repurposed in the context of a
particular brand of Western musical practice.
To be sure, Reich’s music is often described as a conduit for a great variety
of influences, including African music, but ranging extensively across both ge-
ography and history—from Balinese gamelan music to medieval organum and
beyond. This chapter will show, however, that of these many potential sources of
inspiration, the African source is irreducible—foundational of both the content
of the musical modules and the compositional processes to which they are sub-
ject. The other apparent influences capture neither the scope nor the authority
of African music on Reich’s distinctive style. Paradoxically, some of these non-
African influences even take their cue from Reich’s reading of African music.
Take, for example, the argument about the apparent influence of organum—
harmonic parallelism in the manner of Pérotin and Léonin—on Reich’s sense
of harmony. The evidence indicates that this interest in medieval music actually
derives from Reich’s reading of Jones’s various references to medieval organum
in his explanations of African harmony. In fact, Jones’s Studies in African Music
frequently references organum as a useful analogy for explaining the workings
of African harmonic language. Likewise, his shorter texts repeatedly describe
African harmonies in terms of medieval organum. For example, Jones and Kombe
argue that the harmonies of the song accompanying the Icila dance mentioned
266 Beyond the West

previously are in “parallel 4ths, and is undiluted Organum.”19 The writers even
spend time describing the way Africans deal with the potential musica ficta–like
elements particular to this harmonic practice.20 Likewise, in his book on African
music of the colony of Northern Rhodesia, Jones refers to the African use of “or-
ganum”—“that sort of harmony our forefathers delighted in around the years
900–1050 A.D.”—as an approach to harmony.21 Jones notes that this development
of African harmony occurred “quite apart from European influence.”22 I cannot
take up the full impact of African harmonic practice on Reich’s output here,
except to note that even some of the references to apparently Western musical
influences are likely sourced from his readings of African music.
In sum, despite the fact that Reich’s compositional output is mostly interpreted
within a Euro-American cultural framework, non-Western, and particularly
African, music served as an important resource for Reich’s musical development
and occupied a capacious place in his entire output. From the earliest works,
such as the aforementioned tape compositions and phase pieces, to music
written well after his trip to Ghana—including Music for 18 Musicians, Tehillim
(1981), Different Trains (1988), Nagoya Marimbas (1994), Cello Counterpoint
(2003), Mallet Quartet (2009), and so on—Reich’s works are plausibly portrayed
as creative paraphrases of music from various parts of Africa.
Instead of attempting a comprehensive historical overview of the works,
this chapter will engage close analysis, and simultaneously trace the references,
citations, styles, and techniques pertaining to specific source materials in
Africa, in the context of a single work, namely, Electric Counterpoint (1987).
It will then briefly describe the original function and context of the music in
local communities in Africa, even if these are not demonstrably known by the
composer who appropriated them. Along the way, the examination will suggest
an assessment of the aesthetic-ideological dimensions implicit in the way the
African materials are put to use in a non-African art music context.
Historical musicologists have seldom advanced more than a cursory
recognition of the role of non-Western culture in their assessment of the
vocabularies seminal to the development of contemporary Western artistic
and musical thought. This chapter sets an agenda for the study of twentieth-
century music that not only recognizes the diversity of the subject but also sees
this global complexity as fundamental to the definition of twentieth-century
music. This necessarily involves the incongruous juxtaposition of different
conventions, worldviews, and values, as well as the incorporation of tradition-
ally marginalized areas of musical activity within the interpretative matrix of
dominant interpretations. Reflecting the multifaceted nature of its topic, this
research offers a series of successive passes into the musical makeup of Electric
Counterpoint in the hope of illuminating moments and passages of sound from a
variety of complementary perspectives. While the focus is resolutely on musical
production, the project draws on fieldwork-derived ethnographic data, archival
documents (in Africa, Europe, and America), analyses of institutional histories,
Afro-Electric Counterpoint 267

and aspects of political geography, technology studies, and media theory. My

aim is to track the way music and sound circulates within different regimes of
meaning and value, with a particular interest in retrieving the often tributary
and ephemeral phenomena found in geographically remote cultures that, for
complex reasons, are systematically written out of world history. The historical
account I  am proposing announces neither the diminished value of Western
music nor its retrospective demise, but aims instead to responsibly enlarge and
supplement existing histories of Western music, and thereby genuinely globalize
our understanding of cultural production.

Biography of a Sound: Ndereje Balendoro

Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint begins with the unusual sound of massed
guitars, spelling out chords that exceed the customary sonic reach of the guitar.
Giant modal pitch blocks shift elusively against the steady state of pulsation.
This is a giant hyper-guitar curiously articulated with a delicate touch. When
the music scales down to the dimensions of the solo instrument, it does so by
gradually opening a translucent soundscape inhabited by identical figures that
leap and turn and dip to their own beat. Initially consisting of barely four notes,
these emergent figures spin out an interesting internal temporality. Ostensibly,
the figures are set in four measures of mere common time, but in fact exchange
between binary and ternary patterning with a two-pulse anacrusis. The result is
a pattern that agilely leaps, turns, and then falls in the context of a two-pulsed
grouping and then dips twice in a three-pulsed one—a back and forth that is
repeated with a very small shift. Example 12.1 displays the grouping structure
marked by numbers and square brackets beneath the staff.
What are these elusive figures? What is their distinctive mode of polyphonic
play? Immediately following the arrival of the figure, fragments of a second
figure played by the live guitarist in exactly the same pitch range as the first
dart and dive in and out of spaces left by the first figure. Out of these transitory
appearances, which become increasingly ornate, a fully formed figure gradu-
ally materializes, one that anticipates the first figure by two beats. The resulting
two-voice canon at the unison yields a new set of contrapuntal strands: the first
an approximate palindrome formed by broken repetitions on D occasionally
tilting to E; the second an almost uninterrupted oscillation between A and B

Example 12.1 Rhythmic grouping of the module in Electric Counterpoint.

268 Beyond the West

Example 12.2 Overall resultant pattern at rehearsal 13.

(see Ex. 12.2). Minimal use of pitch materials (coupled with minimal shifts
in articulation) that circle in an abbreviated registral span has the effect of
drawing attention to the details of this contrapuntal/rhythmic fallout. The logic
of the canonic strands alone suggests, with equal validity, a downbeat either on
the first beat of the first and third measures or on the third beat of the second
and fourth measures. This mode of metric entrainment is determined by the
staggered phase relation between the two modules alone.
On the other hand, the logic of the overall resultant pattern as analyzed by
Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff ’s metrical preference rules (MPRs), might un-
derstand rhythm and meter in this context as MPR 5a, namely, “a metrical struc-
ture in which onsets of relatively long events are aligned with strong beats,”23
suggesting as downbeat either the third beat of the first and third measures
or the first beat of the second and fourth measures. At this point in Electric
Counterpoint, however, the first four pulses of the first and third measures are
identical to the second four pulses of the second and fourth measures, thereby
confounding Lerdahl and Jackendoff ’s “parallel musical segments” rule (MPR
1). Any claim to the downbeat by the first beat of measures 1 and 3 is unsettled
by the corresponding claim to the downbeat by the second beat of measures 2
and 4. In fact, using the “event onset” rule (MPR 3) provides one of the strongest
claims to placing the metric downbeat on beat 2 of measures 1 and 3 and beat
4 of measures 2 and 4. One example of the many alternate metric groupings is
marked by the square brackets below the staff (Ex. 12.2).
The subtle ambiguity about the precise place of the downbeat, as the two
figures twist and turn, is matched by the subtle ambiguity regarding the pitch
space in which the music dwells. While seemingly encased in a kind of D dyad
(with genuflections toward upper neighbors), the resultant canon figure does
not open into a recognizable modal collection at this point. With the addition
of just one note (either G or F♯), the possibility opens up of a pentatonic subset
derived from the harmonic blocks of the music’s introductory pulsing. At re-
hearsal 15 a second recorded guitar takes up the second figure; the live player
fades out, haltingly initiating another run of fragmentary figures, this time with
descending leaping gestures leading away from the lowest note A  of the re-
sultant canon. Little by little, these motifs fashion a figure identical to the initial
figure a perfect fifth below it, as if to offer a nod toward the idea of a traditional
tonal answer to the theme. At the same time, the resulting pitch collection, with
the inclusion of G, completes one of the two possible pentatonic sets. As it was
Afro-Electric Counterpoint 269

Example 12.3 Overall resultant pattern at rehearsal 21.

before, this new figure is established and taken over by the recorded music,
before yet another canonic figure (also a fifth below and out of phase by two
beats) is introduced, step by step, by the live guitar. The overall resultant pattern
emphasizes the metric ambiguity of the pattern, sounding the (evenly spread)
minor seventh chord (built on E) on every aforementioned potential downbeat,
with chords built upon variously stacked constellations of fourths and fifths on
the intervening pulses (see Ex. 12.3).
In the next staggered entry, the live guitar tries out yet another scale degree,
this time a figure separated by the interval of a second from guitar 3. This new
constellation recalls, in abbreviated form, the harmonic color of the opening
pulsations—a sound of variously stacked seconds in the context of ninth and
eleventh chords. At the same time, with the inclusion of F♯, this entry completes
the second possible pentatonic subset implied by the opening figure (i.e., A—
B—D—E—F♯). As if to reinforce this possibility, and also to restrict to each
canonic entry the introduction of at most one new pitch class, Reich avoids a
literal canonic entry at this point by substituting E for C (yielding the tetra-
chord D—E—F♯—G). Once it fades into the taped guitar 5 (at rehearsal 24),
the new canonic figure becomes coloristic, smudging the pitch content of
guitar 3 to produce a floating rhythmic contour. While never quite predictable,
the remaining entries gradually spread these figures through the octave span
below: thus, guitar 6 doubles guitar 2 an octave below; guitar 7 doubles guitar
1 an octave below; and guitar 8, which is introduced directly as prerecorded
music (perhaps to hasten and offset the patent gradual process), doubles guitar
3 an octave below.24 At rehearsal 32, the live guitar then breaks out of the logic
of canonic imitation and plays a more continuous line, one borne out of the
inherent pattern produced by the highest notes in the musical texture. Against
this, the remaining instruments (guitars 9, 10, and 11) issue forth the opening
pulsations once more. These pulsations move through approximately the same
chord progressions (and sudden modulation) as the opening pulsations, only
now they sustain the polyrhythmic texture of the staggered figures and finally
fade away into the next movement (see Ex. 12.4).
As it is with most of Reich’s music, Electric Counterpoint is intensely self-
referential:  fragments of sound congeal into distinct figures in an audible
process, which forms patterns of intricacy and variety that exceed its formal
logic. The music is profoundly intratextual, alert to what Reich would call the
“minute sound details”:  permutations and mutations produced by gradually
270 Beyond the West

Example 12.4 Harmonic scheme for the introduction to Electric Counterpoint.

expanding and ever-rotating canonic relationships.25 Yet, like all music, Electric
Counterpoint is in fact also irreducibly intertextual, referencing a distinctive
type of non-Western polyphonic interplay. Where exactly does the interlacing
mobile of musical figures, which forms the expressive center of this movement
from Electric Counterpoint, originate?
This is music of the Banda Linda, a people numbering around thirty thou-
sand who live in a wooded savanna region of central Africa. The theme is taken
from music conceived for a giant horn orchestra comprising between ten and
eighteen antelope horns (of various species) and wooden horns (ango), made
from the calabash tree (opo), as well as pellet bells (engbi). The horns are tuned
to the anhemitonic pentatonic scale (a scale devoid of half tones), which is prob-
ably derived from the Banda Linda xylophone scale (although this point has
been contested). In performance, the horns, arranged in a curved row from high
to low pitched, generally enter in consecutively descending order. Among the
Banda Linda this purely instrumental genre is associated with rites of passage
for adolescent youths, who learn to play the instrument during their initiatory
retreat. The music, derived from various traditional sung genres, is played for
pleasure to conclude the initiation rites.26
Reich, who briefly met the French-Israeli ethnomusicologist Simha
Arom in Paris in 1976, discovered this music in Arom’s book Polyphonies et
Polyrhythmies Instrumentales d’Afrique Centrale, published in 1985.27 Arom was
initially sent by the Israeli government to establish European-style brass music
in the Central African Republic in the 1960s. The ethnomusicologist became
disenchanted with his official task, however, and quickly turned his attentions
to local horn music practices. Having recognized the subtle artistry and com-
plexity of it, Arom dedicated decades of his life to studying, recording, and
transcribing music of the central African region.28 Arom deployed a novel tech-
nique for recording the heterogeneous ensemble (which he dubbed “tutti re-
cording”), whereby individual members of the ensemble are recorded as soloists
Afro-Electric Counterpoint 271

by deploying an internal playback of a recording of the entire ensemble.29 In a

series of articles, as well as the book Polyphonies et Polyrhythmies, Arom system-
atically analyzes the music of various central African ensembles in terms of a se-
miotic method developed by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Jean Molino, and others.30 In
particular, Arom aimed to uncover the simplified “structural entity” or “model”
that underlies the intricately patterned polyrhythmic strands of the music.31 To
this end, Polyphonies et Polyrhythmies provides extensive transcriptions of large
multipart ensembles, which are rendered in various tabular arrangements.
The music of the first movement of Reich’s Electric Counterpoint is taken
from Arom’s transcriptions of an Ippy horn orchestra’s performance of ndereje
balendoro, an eighteen-part piece.32 Apart from the note arrangements them-
selves, the very idea of a performance consisting of soloist and prerecorded tape
containing music of the full ensemble owes an allegiance to the “tutti” playback
technique introduced by Arom in the context of ethnographic recording in the
1970s. In these large ensembles, each horn generally produces a single pitch.
Horns with the same pitch class are assigned names. In Arom’s words:  “The
instruments playing G are called tete; the ones playing E, ta; the ones playing D,
ha; the ones playing C, tutule; and the ones playing A, bongo.”33 The six upper
horns can produce an additional upper embellishing tone, by way of a small
hole drilled at the top of the horn known as ogoro ango (hole in the horn).34
The horns are also assigned a “family” name according to each group of horns
adding up to a pentatonic collection within a registral span; the highest family
is called tuwule or tutuwule; the second, ngbanja; the third, aga; and the fourth,
yaviri.35 According to Arom:
Tuwule is an onomatopoeitic term for the embroidered figures played by
the antelope horn instruments using their embellishing note.  .  .  . Ngbanja
designates a kind of file or rasp, for as the Linda people say, “The rasp makes
a loud noise.” When someone speaks in a loud voice, they say, “He has a voice
like a ngbanja.” The register is the easiest to play in. Aga designates a kind of
fish. The master of the horns says no one remembers any longer why this reg-
ister is so called (“All the elders who once knew are now dead”). Finally, yaviri
is the word for “heavy rain, storm, thunder.”36
Except for the first horn player, each successive horn player commences his part
in relation to the preceding part one pentatonic step above it. These parts con-
sist of short repeating figures, which are combined with one another in a way
that emphasizes the principle of interlocking. Although the basic cell (which
Arom calls a “model”) for each part remains intact throughout the performance,
performers vary their patterns through subtle rhythmic manipulations, adding
or subtracting notes and extending or splitting note values. After an introduc-
tory gambit involving a kind of “call and response” between the first horn, which
rhythmically intones a fragment of repeated notes, and a tutti response, which
issues a raucous held cluster chord, the individual horns enter in descending
272 Beyond the West

Example 12.5 Arom’s model for ndereje balendoro.

Arom (1991) 2004, 371.

order with their characteristic hocketing rhythmic figures. Once the musicians
have all entered, we reach the crux of the performance. Arom explains:

The musicians with the antelope-horn instruments perform embroideries,

embellishing notes, and trills, while held notes predominate in the lowest reg-
ister. The musicians with the oblique instruments turn from side to side to start
up musical dialogues with their closest neighbors, as they break in on, reply
to, and pretend to parody one another. This part will last as long as the ende
[“master of the horns”] likes.37

Although the intricate variations are seemingly infinite in number, Arom

considers them to consist of the “uninterrupted repetition of diverse realizations
of the rhythmic figures assigned to each instrument. . . . [All] these variations
derive from a single simplified motif which provides each musician with the
ultimate reference, or model [elsewhere called ‘paradigmatic theme’], for his
part.”38 The model is presented in Example 12.5. Arom identifies various features
regarding the formula:
(1) the formula is based on a cycle of four pulsations; the durations of the
sounds in this cycle include no more than a crotchet, twelve quavers, and two
semiquavers; (2) no degree on the pentatonic scale has a total duration exceeding
the value of a dotted crotchet; (3) there are only two sorts of “con-sonance” (i.e.
simultaneity), both fifths (C–G and A–E, the latter being used twice).39

Contesting African Analytics

Before describing the precise musical relationship between Reich’s Electric

Counterpoint and ndereje balendoro, it is relevant to point out certain key
features of these patterned horn figures not examined by Arom. I posit a slightly
different basic theme (or resulting “model”) derived less from an analysis of
primary musical elements and more from actually performed patterns that, sta-
tistically speaking, predominate in the notated performance. Instead of casting
a music-analytic optic, these figures are therefore idealized average realizations
of each respective part. I have notated this basic theme in Example 12.6. Some
characteristics become immediately apparent. First, it seems that the first horn
is generally permitted to articulate the first four pulses (of the first beat) in the
Afro-Electric Counterpoint 273

Example 12.6 A different model for ndereje balendoro.

structure. While the actual variations often sound out on all four pulses (some-
times adorned with an upper neighbor, sometimes not), variations employing
fewer than four pulses generally articulate at least the very first beat in the
structure. Also, when more than one pulse is sounded, these are generally im-
mediately adjacent to one another (yielding sixteenth-note values in Arom’s
rendition).
Second, it seems that the first horn is generally never permitted to articulate
any of the four pulses of the second beat of the structure. In the variations, the
first horn invariably leaves these pulses silent. In sum, the first half of the struc-
ture thus elaborates a kind of “binary”-type timing pattern, oscillating between
four sounding pulses and four silent ones. In the second half of the structure,
it seems that horn 1 is obliged to briefly articulate the ninth and twelfth pulses
and to remain silent during all intervening pulses. This patterning is remarkably
consistent across the equivalent instruments of the ensemble (in this case the
tuwule) throughout the duration of the performance. In sum, the second half of
the structure gently suggests a kind of ternary type of timing in the context of
a two-beat time span. Taken as a whole, horn 1 oscillates between, on the one
hand, a “binary” temporality rich in variation and, on the other, a “ternary” tem-
porality practically devoid of variation. These qualities are indicated by square
brackets below each staff line (see Ex. 12.7).
Horn 2, it seems, is preoccupied with the spaces left silent by horn 1. More
exactly, horn 2 is permitted to articulate the first two pulses of the second beat
(namely, pulses 5 and 6). In performance practice, this horn part generally intones
274 Beyond the West

Example 12.7 A different analysis of the five horn parts.

only pulse 5, immediately after the first horn’s figure falls into silence. The combined
structure therefore reinforces the “binary” temporality of the first half of the struc-
ture implied by horn 1. The same principle seems to apply in the second half of the
structure, where horn 2 briefly intones the pulses directly following those given
in horn 1 (namely, pulses 10 and 13). Once again, this reinforces the “ternary”
aspect of the temporal patterning of horn 1. Considering horn 1 and horn 2 to-
gether illustrates an interesting case of cooperative contrast. While these parts are
completely in between each other (with horn 2 performing only in the gaps left
by horn 1), the manner of their interlocking is coordinated around a common
oscillating temporality. In other words, the quality of the hocketing shifts to mu-
tually reinforce a temporal back and forth.
Horn 3 tends to fall into the spaces left silent by both horns 2 and 1. The var-
iations for this part generally emphasize the upbeat of the second and fourth
beats (namely pulses 7, 8, 15, and 16), sometimes with one note, sometimes
with two. Variations on horn 3 frequently also articulate pulses 3 and 4, which
coincides with the music of horn 1. On the one hand, this suggests the Linda
may regard this sonority as a viable harmonic simultaneity; on the other hand,
the logic of hocketing still appears primarily to apply. Of the four pulses artic-
ulated on the first beat by horn 1, pulses 3 and 4 are sounded out least in per-
formance (hence the parentheses in Ex. 12.7). Arguably, then, these coincisions
Afro-Electric Counterpoint 275

arise from the embellishment of a fundamentally interlocking situation. Taken

as a whole, the pattern produced by the third horn issues a “binary”-type tem-
porality throughout the structure. Its consistent up-beating pattern is therefore
regularly contra-metric.
Interestingly, however, where the upper horns congeal into a “ternary”-type
temporal grouping (between pulses 9 and 14), horn 3 mostly leaves the pulses
unsounded, effectively leaving open space in the texture for the implied ternary
patterning of horns 1 and 2. Interesting, too, is the relationship of horns 1 and
3 vis-à-vis horn 2. Both have no points of coincidence with horn 2. But the re-
spective patterns of these strictly hocketing relationships are differently woven
into the spaces of the second horn’s part. As a result, horns 1 and 3 are also by
and large in a hocketing relationship with one another.
Horn 4 contrasts with the “binary”-to-“ternary”-type temporal grouping that
is implied by the first three horns. Here the pattern begins with “ternary”-type
grouping and gradually shifts toward “binary”-type grouping (which sounds out
the first of beats 3 and 4, namely, pulses 9 and 13). Occasionally, the “ternary”
pattern is mutated into a three-against-two figure that cuts across the pulse-level
in the lower horns of this horn class (tutule). As a whole, horn 4 is therefore a
kind of inside-out version of horn 1, a perfect fifth above it. Where the latter
moves from a “binary”- to a “ternary”-type grouping, the former shifts from
a “ternary” to a “binary” type, as if to infuse the qualities of one with those of
the other. As a result of their concurrent presentation of inversely patterned
temporalities, these two horn parts coincide on pulses 1, 2, 4, and 9, thereby is-
suing the C–G simultaneity noted by Arom. As it is with horn 2, horn 5 leaves
silent the first four pulses of the structure and articulates pulse 10 to reinforce
the ternary-type patterning (at play in the first three horns). Thereafter, horn 5
for the most part doubles the rhythmic up-beating of horn 3 a perfect fourth
below horn 3. The rhythmic unison issues a simultaneity (D–A), obviously ac-
cepted by the Banda Linda, but this time not noted by Arom.
Taken as a whole, the Banda Linda horn ensemble produces patterns of
subtlety and fluctuation that exceed the sum of its various parts. Sometimes
these patterns are responsive to the principle of interlocking, other times to
that of rhythmic unison; sometimes they are responsive to the principle of
oscillating temporalities, other times to that of interpenetrating temporalities
(or polyrhythms). Despite this multicapillaried jostling and cajoling, no adjacent
performers coincide at any points in the pattern: barring the fleeting coincision
on pulse 4 of horns 3 and 4; that is, adjacent horns are strictly interwoven vis-à-vis
one another. Perhaps this rhythmic principle is also a harmonic principle. That
is to say, parts may only coincide between nonadjacent performers in the semi-
circle, thereby avoiding harmonic constellations involving steps in the pentatonic
scale, and opening harmonic constellations composed of various fourths and
fifths and one third. Against Arom, I would argue that G–C and D–A are there-
fore the two primary “con-sonances” in ndereje balendoro.40 Finally, despite the
276 Beyond the West

complex texture emerging from the interaction of multiple strands in the horn
orchestra, not every pulse is given a sound: pulses 11 and 14, for example, are
generally silent pulses, while pulse 6 is barely sounded. Arguably, these punctures
in the latticed texture are an imprint of the song’s fundamental formal identity.
I take this analytic excursion to examine closely the manner in which Reich
uses this signature model in Electric Counterpoint. To what extent, “structur-
ally” speaking (to invoke the composer’s terms), does the quotation behave like
the traditional central African orchestra? Does the new music retain any of the
values of the original when the music is translated from blown horns to electric
guitars? How, in turn, does this translation comment on the character of the
original?
Reich’s interlacing use of the horn figure in Electric Counterpoint turns out
to be both more and less exacting than the interlacing logic of the original. An
immediate point of similarity, for example, is the tempo indication—the met-
ronome markings of both Arom’s and Reich’s score indicate ♩ = 192. In other
words, there appears to be an ideal tempo for the proper polyphonic functioning
of the module. An immediate difference, on the other hand, is the fact that a
single instrumental line in Electric Counterpoint performs the entire pattern,
which in its original form is crafted by three distinct hocketing horns. Reich
derives the theme by approximately combining parts for horns 1 to 3, depicted
in Example 12.8, and extending the pattern with a slight variation of itself to
a four-measure unit in the score. Interestingly, Reich’s variation—achieved by
simply omitting the third E in the pattern—is a typical African modus ope-
randi in the context of circling musical modules. In Example 12.9, for instance,
horn 9 varies its basic pattern by omission of tones in realizations 11, 12, and
13. Paradoxically, however, the third E in ndereje balendoro is always present

Example 12.8 Arom’s transcriptions of the first five Banda Linda horns.

Arom (1991) 2004, 351–54.
Afro-Electric Counterpoint 277

Example 12.9 Variation by omission in Banda Linda horn music.

Arom (1991) 2004, 358. See variations 11, 12, and 13.

(perhaps vividly to preserve the nod to “ternary” timing at this point in the pat-
tern). At any rate, the pattern in Electric Counterpoint is produced by a single
instrumental line instead of a host of distinct horns sounding forth on single
pitch classes. Perhaps Reich conjures the spirit of the original when the new
entries articulate short, seemingly unpredictable fragments against the initial
figure. These rhythmic fragments approximate the condition of the punctured
solo entries of the original, but they do not observe the underlying model in the
same way. Instead of introducing patterns of silence and sound that gradually
clarify the interlocking whole, as in the African music, these entries appear in
a more casual additive process. Until they congeal into the basic cell that forms
the canonic figure, Reich’s motive-like fragments are essentially patterned in a
freely irregular way.
Despite this difference, Reich seems to have been responsive to aspects of
the horn music’s structural behavior as well. First, while the original music
does not unfold in staggered canons, Reich’s canonic mechanism resonates—
both expressively and structurally—with the African original. Expressively
speaking, the staggered imitations in Electric Counterpoint approximate the elu-
sively interpenetrating quality of the original music. Structurally speaking, such
staggered canons—the basis of Reich’s hallmark phasing technique—are found
in various African traditions (including, as mentioned earlier, those transcribed
and recorded by A. M. Jones, Hugh Tracey, and Gerhard Kubik in the 1940s,
1950s, and 1960s, with which Reich was well acquainted).
As stated at the outset, I  cannot develop the full extent of Reich’s indebt-
edness to this aspect of African musical practice in this chapter, but it is im-
portant to deepen the history of its precise ethnographic circulation at this
juncture. Already as far back as the 1940s, Jones had distilled the phasing tech-
nique as a central component of African rhythmic practice. He continued to
develop this line of thinking throughout his writings. A good example includes
278 Beyond the West

Jones’s representation of phased ternary patterns in his comparison between

drumming techniques of the Lala people of Zambia and the Ewe people of
Ghana in his Studies in African Music.41 His description of the phasing process
is illustrative:
When [the drummer] introduces his variant . . . he slips one quaver, thereby
making a permanent cross-rhythm with Gankogui. Not only is this typical of
Ewe practice [the contrast case] but the cross-rhythm he sets up is the exact
counterpart of that made by the Ewe small drum Kagan. There are two ways of
crossing two similar triple times: you can slip one quaver or you can slip two.42
Jones presents a diagram of the staggered canonic relationship between three
parts to illustrate the nature of African phasing technique. Although written
nearly a decade before Reich’s first phasing compositions, it practically reads like
a guide to the composer’s compositional process. Again, even in his tape pieces
It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out, Reich aimed to set up African-type phase rela-
tions. The tape pieces emerged less out of two tape loops gradually falling out of
phase with one another than they did by gradually falling into phase with one
another after having been set up, in Reich’s words, “180 degrees out of phase”
with one another.43 In Reich’s less circumspect words, “[Jones’s transcriptions
were] a very potent piece of information, especially for someone fooling around
with tape loops, which I began to view as little mechanized Africans.”44 Jones had
devised these principles from an earlier study of a drumming and dance style
from Zambia known as Icila. In his description of the relationship between
drums, no less than in his transcription of the full ensemble, Jones indicates
the staggered relationship between parts.45 For example, the Akache and Ikulu
drumming patterns, identical in rhythm but variable in sticking and stress, are
separated by four pulses in the transcription of the full score.46
Other sources of information regarding African phasing techniques abound
in the then-contemporary literature. For example, Kubik’s representations of
“aural images” in Ennanga music from Uganda similarly reflects staggered rela-
tions between inherent patterns.47 Likewise, the music of the Mbira dza Vadzimu
and Matepe of Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia)—variously annotated in
the 1950s and 1960s by Hugh Tracey and Andrew Tracey in the journal African
Music (to which, as noted, Reich had access at the Cornell University library
during his studies there)—provided the composer with a template for music
fundamentally grounded in staggered phase relationships between parts.
Thus, Reich could use an African compositional technique from one part of
Africa on quoted material from another part of Africa, which does not in fact use
that technique, paradoxically to conjure the time-transcending, almost halluci-
natory, expressive character of the original African music. Furthermore, Reich
overlaps the two patterns in an optimally Africanized sense. Let me explain.
First, given the inherent oscillation of “binary” and “ternary” time in the orig-
inal pattern, Reich overlaps them in a way that equally infuses properties of one
Afro-Electric Counterpoint 279

with those of the other. Second, by beginning the canonic entry (“comes”) on the
fourth beat of the original figure (“dux”), Reich avoids all coincidence between
the two parts. In other words, this is the only possible pulse position that yields
an entirely nonoverlapping resultant pattern (see Ex. 12.10). While this result is
produced on the terrain of canonic imitation, such noncoincidence conjures the
spirit of the original noncoinciding horn parts, which demonstrably operate on
the terrain of interlocking. Again, Reich employs a particular African principle
in the context of different African material to generate a characteristic of the
latter African figure in the unique musical soundworld of Electric Counterpoint.
As it is with the original music, Reich extends the music downward in a
manner that resembles the horn “families,” which extend into the depths, and
the lattice of the musical construction becomes analogously more complex as
a result. Still more astute is the way Reich introduces these new figures. Recall
that he uses a figure composed of only the first three horns, thus producing
only the three tones (G, E, D) as well as an embellishing tone A. In the orig-
inal music, the horns sound out the full pentatonic collection. To complete the
collection without adding a new pattern (a compositional restriction produced
by the phasing technique derived from various different African traditions),
Reich introduces the same “three-horn” guitar figure a fifth below the original.
This effectively serves to introduce the final tone one third below the lowest
note of the abbreviated pattern. The new pattern also serves to introduce the
final pitch of the original pattern a second below that. Given the striking re-
semblance between the horn patterns 1 and 4 at the beginning of beats 1 and
3 (outlined in my earlier analysis), the resulting music sounds remarkably as
if it logically embeds the original African pattern. The African module is har-
monically and contrapuntally richer than Reich’s (both engaging a wider array
of intervals—fifths, fourths, thirds, and unisons—and subtly infusing metric
diversity into the pattern; for example, ternary time into the alto voice in the
first half of the module), but the resemblance, depicted in Example 12.11, is
striking.
It is as if the canonic entries a fifth below Reich’s original figure bring to com-
pletion, via the hypothetical additions of horns 4 and 5 of the original, the full
African figure. Remarkably, Reich is able to conjure the complete African figure
not by imitation as much as by the unique logic of an Africanized downward
extension of a pitch-class “family” in the context of canonic phasing. In other
words, the partial quotation is cast into an African process that “runs by itself ”
(as Reich might say), which then produces the fully formed original as a resultant

Example 12.10 Nonoverlapping figures in Electric Counterpoint.

280 Beyond the West

Example 12.11 Comparison of original horn pattern with Reich’s Africanized extension;

in (a) original pattern (transposed up a fifth); (b) Reich’s extended pitch-class “family.”

(a)

(b)

pattern.48 If his audiences were versed in the original, this would count as a curi-
ously recursive and referential musical passage. As it is in some works by Brahms
and Mahler, for example, it is as if Reich’s skillful deployment of an African mu-
sical procedure of itself produces the complete quotation of the original.49 From
an African point of view, this would resemble the kind of listening scenario we
find in the uncanny invocation of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in the first movement
of Brahms’s first symphony, for example. While the aesthetic world is quite dif-
ferent, this passage likewise suggests the paradoxical temporality of producing a
referential allusion to the past through the future-oriented logic of developing
variation. In other words, the allusion to the “Beethoven” apotheosis (in a major
key) seems to emerge from the short opening theme of the symphony (in a
minor key), as if to have emerged from its own developmental unfolding. Reich’s
invocation-through-phasing of a quoted African fragment at this moment in
Electric Counterpoint is of a similar expressive sort. Far from a study in gradual
processes alone, this music conjures historical reference and resonance. The full
range and subtlety of Reich’s intertextual resonance can only be perceived if its
African components are reconstituted as one of its fundamental referents.

Phenomenology of an Algorithm (of Makwa and Gankogui)

Reflecting his concern for a structural engagement with it, Steve Reich’s use of
African music ranges from direct quotation to abstract invocation. The second
and third movements of Electric Counterpoint deploy many of the techniques
found in the first movement, yet the African components are somewhat less
overt. In particular, Reich juxtaposes sections that elaborate canonic phasing of
distinct musical modules with those composed of shifting modal pitch blocks.
The second movement is in two parts. The music begins with a distinct canonic
module, which gradually unfolds hocket-rich phasing interactions in pairs in
the alto, soprano, and tenor registers (for the first fifty-one measures). The music
then opens into the reminiscent sound of amassed chords in the bass, which
simultaneously pulse with the circling phase patterns, before briefly ushering
Afro-Electric Counterpoint 281

in the third movement via diminuendo (for exactly another fifty-one meas-
ures). The module itself can be heard as either three distinct phrases in 3/4,
5/8, and 4/4, respectively, or (more plausibly) as two asymmetrically grouped
phrases articulating an ornamented descent from B above the treble clef to the
oscillating root notes C♯ and D♯, respectively.
As is common in African melodizing, these musical lines never ascend but
only descend in cascading cyclic fashion. African melodic lines, notably those
encountered by Reich in ethnographic work of the 1960s (ranging from melodies
produced by Jege A. Tapera on the mbira to those of Mwenda Jean Bosco on the
guitar) are generally directed downward. The technical reason for this downward
impulse concerns the particularity of African modes of harmonic patterning and
tuning practices, an aspect of African practice toward which Reich shows little,
if any, interest. Here it suffices to point out the general African character of the
melodies in the second movement of Electric Counterpoint. More precisely, the
character of these descending lines, from a fixed high point to a noncadential
oscillation between two root notes, is a common technique for generating
cycles in sub-Saharan African music. This kind of compositional maneuvering
is described by numerous writers in the 1960s across the terrain of southern
African musical genres, ranging from the music of the Nsenga Kalimba, Shona
Mbira dza Vadzimu, Xhosa Umrhube mouthbow, Xizambi friction bow, Katanga
guitar, and even that of Zulu praise poetry.50
The canonic module that grounds the phase relations of the second move-
ment of Electric Counterpoint is a root-progression melody of this sort. The first
phrase (mm. 1–2) descends through the hexachord by way of a downward leap
and then steps to D♯, followed by a sixteenth-note embellishment that recoups
the missing pitch G♯ of the opening leap, to the root note C♯. In this way, the
line completes the stepwise descent (from B to C♯) through the full hexachord
by way of the paradoxical sound of two leaping fourths at the close. The second
phrase (m. 3), a parallelism of the first (at first), is a more efficient descent, al-
beit equally adorned by a brief belated leap up to G♯, this time down to the
root note D♯. The second phrase thus both functions as a pun on the phasing
technique to come and also establishes the oscillating “root progression” cycle
of the entire module. It should be noted that the pitch collection deployed for
each respective descent is a subset of the hexachord that grounds the canonic
phase-shifting section (C♯–D♯–E–F♯–G♯–B), which is itself a subset of the larger
diatonic set that grounds the movement as a whole. In particular, Reich’s de-
scending lines thereby elaborate the signature sound of a melody composed of
intervals of seconds, thirds, and fourths.
This approach is consistent with the analyses and transcriptions found in
the contemporaneous literature on African music. By the mid-1960s, Reich
encountered the writings of Kwabena Nketia, then professor of music at the
University of Legon (Ghana), as well as that of the South African ethnomusicol-
ogist and archivist Hugh Tracey (with whom Reich had been in communication
282 Beyond the West

a year before contacting A. M. Jones), David Rycroft, John Blacking, and others.
Reich had contacted Hugh Tracey in the summer of 1966 requesting recordings
of African music, as well as explanations about how it works. In response, Tracey
shared with Reich details about how to secure recordings of music from central
and southern Africa from Tracey’s curated “Sound of Africa” series, and further-
more connected Reich to Nketia for musical resources pertaining to the regions
north of the Congo.
Nketia describes the characteristic compositional procedure in his book
The Music of Africa in the following terms: “The structure of melodies built out
of . . . scales is based on the controlled use of selected interval sequences.”51 Nketia
demonstrates the various ways tetrachords and pentachords embedded within
scale systems serve as the basis for conjunct sequences of downwardly directed
melody formation, which can thereby emphasize certain signature intervals
within a given melody, limited to “the frequent use of small intervals—seconds,
thirds, and fourths.”52 As can be seen, the descending lines of the module in
Electric Counterpoint deploy both the principles (and, in this case, the intervals)
described by Nketia in his chapter on the melodic techniques of African music.
Reich expands the harmonic reach of the canonic cycles, first, by gradually
introducing three new lines that double the first three guitars a fourth above
the original (guitars 4, 5, and 6 from rehearsals 48 to 53), and then by gradually
doubling the same a fifth below (guitars 7, 8, and 9 from rehearsals 54 to 60).
Once the expanded harmonic range is established, the live guitar introduces a
kind of okukonera-type pattern produced by selected aspects of the sum of its
nine parts. This more continuous pattern introduces inherently produced dyads
at the third, an interval that is paradoxically (largely) absent from the sound of
the pattern’s linear projection. In this way, the inherent pattern is particularly
sensitive to the unguessed-at material latent to the contrapuntal situation.53 It
is noteworthy that Reich, once again, omits one pitch class in the harmonic ex-
pansion produced by melodic parallelism in guitars 4 to 9. We noted a similar
deviation in the first movement, effectively breaking with a melodic pattern to
accommodate a harmonic idea. Instead of opting for note A on the third note
of the transposed module (cf. rehearsal 48ff.), a pitch class that falls within the
overall diatonic set, Reich alters the contour of the line by substituting the note
D♯.54 This has the effect, first, of echoing the starting note of the initial melody
and, second, of expanding the pitch field without expanding the pitch-class field;
or, otherwise put, the Africanized “effect of shifting tonality, although there is no
modulation.” Ethnomusicologists of African music in the 1960s, including both
Jones and Nketia, richly describe the use of both harmonic parallelism and the
avoidance of exact linear imitation in precisely such terms. Drawing on songs of
the Gogo of central Tanzania, the Pangwa and Nyakusa of southern Tanzania,
and the Wala and Adangme of Ghana, Nketia demonstrates that harmoniza-
tion by way of “parallelism in fourths or fifths” is a defining characteristic of
African music.55 He further notes that occasional thirds result “depending on
Afro-Electric Counterpoint 283

the note of the scale against which a parallel melody is being sung.”56 In other
words, African musicians alter the melodic parallelism of tones harmonized at
the fourth or fifth to accommodate the integrity of a pitch-class subset (penta-
tonic, hexatonic, heptatonic, etc.). This basic approach is duplicated in the upper
and lower phasing patterns (guitars 4–9) of the second movement of Electric
Counterpoint.
The module in the third movement reflects a somewhat different construc-
tion to that of the second movement, but it is also African-derived. Although
it can be cast as two interlocking descending lines (D–B–A–F♯ and G–F♯–E,
respectively), the module reflects less Nketia’s analytics and more those of
Kubik. Reich applies Kubik’s principles for inherent-pattern formation found
in Ugandan xylophone music, but the composer casts these principles in the
pattern of a makwa handclapping rhythm, associated with the Zimbabwean
mbira. Recall that Kubik’s conditions for the emergence of inherent patterns
include largeness of intervals (to facilitate the audible delinking of individual
tones from their module and permit gestalt formation with different modules),
a high-speed and unaccented approach to performance (to avoid the constraints
of a singular metric entrainment), and the registral overlap between parts (to fa-
cilitate the fusion of individual tones to produce additive lines).57 The module in
the third movement of Electric Counterpoint observes these criteria precisely. In
other words, every interval in the module is a leap (instead of a step), the module
(no more than one measure in length) spans more than an octave, the tempo is
fast (double that of the contrasting second movement), dynamic markings in-
dicate an unchanging mf—barring the soloist, the chords in guitars 5, 6, and 7,
and the basses—all of which are not associated with inherent pattern formation)
and the four phasing guitars patently occupy identical registers. In other words,
this is a well-structured pitch module for the formation of embedded okukonera
lines. Reich pays particular compositional attention to the character of the in-
herent rhythms (“resultant patterns”) in Electric Counterpoint. The discrepancy
between Reich’s handwritten musical sketches and his computer-generated ones
exhibits this difference. That is, the sketches for Electric Counterpoint (housed
at PSS) indicate that Reich rendered the basic interlocking lines with a music
software program. Against this, he wrote out various potential inherent patterns
by hand in red ink on printed copies of these computer-generated lines.58 As in
the second movement, the live guitar doubles an inherent pattern, this time by
emphasizing the four consecutive leaping fifths of the respective canonic entries
at rehearsal 74.

Ambiguities of Handclapping

The rhythmic unit underlying the inherent patterns recalls the module used
by Reich in Clapping Music (1972). In fact, the final sketch associated with
284 Beyond the West

the bundle of notes and sketches for Electric Counterpoint (housed at PSS)
is a rough handwritten rendition of the first six phase relations of Clapping
Music. Example 12.12 is a transcription of Reich’s handwritten final sketch
for Electric Counterpoint. It is likely that the sketch thereby served as an as-
sistive reference point for detecting characteristics of the different phase rela-
tions between the module and its phased clones. This pattern was notated by
A. M. Jones in various places in his studies of African music.59 For example,
in The Icila Dance: Old Style, he notates a pattern associated with the Akache

Example  12.12 Transcription of Reich’s final sketch for Electric Counterpoint (Steve
Reich Collection, PSS).
Afro-Electric Counterpoint 285

drum part that is a rotation by ten time-points of the Clapping Music pattern.60
Jones describes the use of nonsense syllables as a mnemonic device for this
pattern in the context of its performance: “Mba-la Mba-la pa-ku pa-ku.”61 In
the same book, Jones later notates a variation of the Ikulu drum part of this
dance—a part that is frequently in a shifted phase relation to the Akache part
that it complements—which is a non-rotated version of the same pattern we
find in Clapping Music. This pattern, which Jones notates as “Variation 7,” is
considered “the main variation” of Ikulu’s standard rhythm and is memorized
with the following phrase:  “(Tu-) Mbu-lu- mbu lu- mbu ntu-wa.”62 In addi-
tion to providing a direct quote for Reich’s Clapping Music, Jones’s discussion
of this pattern in relation to the phasing process is relevant here. He shows
how, instead of entering at the beginning of the cycle, the coordination of var-
ious patterns involves a phase shift: “Variation 7 [the pattern used in Clapping
Music] consistently enters on the 10th beat . . . instead of on beat 1”; it seems
to comes in “3 beats too early.”63 For Jones, this unique phase position for var-
iation 7 is noteworthy given the fact that “the entry of variation 7 could occur
anywhere . . . because it consists of 12 quavers.”64 In his performance, Kombe
places this pattern on time-point ten of the original pattern, but Jones’s analysis
explicitly recognizes the functional efficiency of its phase rotation on any of the
twelve time-points in the cycle. This is exactly what Reich would do in Clapping
Music, where he systematically rotates variation 7 of Ikulu in all twelve of its
possible phase positions.
As mentioned earlier, however, the pattern itself is also one of a host of
African handclapping patterns associated with the music of the Mbira dza
Vadzimu, known as makwa. These patterns, which have been variously
transcribed by ethnomusicologists such as Andrew Tracey and Paul Berliner,
range from simple patterns, such as regular ternary patterns that coincide with
the hosho (rattle) part, to complex asymmetric ones that resemble virtuosic
solo drumming. In his iconic study Soul of Mbira, Berliner notates four makwa
patterns, all of which coincide with the main beat of the hosho (rattle) pattern.
These have been transcribed in Example 12.13. The fourth handclapping pattern
in the transcriptions (marked as D in the example) is the same as the handclap-
ping pattern used in Clapping Music and again in the third movement of Electric
Counterpoint. Berliner describes this pattern as one “characterized by complex
off-beat phrasing.”65
Berliner notes that the handclapping patterns performed in a mbira ensemble
tend to “combine in many ways and usually participants perform at least two
contrasting patterns simultaneously.”66 His description of the interacting process
resembles a description of Electric Counterpoint itself: “As these patterns interlock
they create a number of resultant phrases with different rhythmic relationships
to the mbira piece.”67 Likewise, in their investigation of the Icila dance of Zambia
(known as Northern Rhodesia at the time of writing in 1952), Jones and Kombe
demonstrate the importance of handclapping in just these terms:
286 Beyond the West

Example 12.13 Paul Berliner’s transcription of four makwa handclapping patterns.

Berliner 1981, 115.

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Very likely [the performers] will divide into two sets of clappers each with
its own rhythm. The combined clapping of these two parties may be a simple
“three-against-two” but it may be much more subtle. . . . [Clapping] is the link
between the drums and the song, for the clapping is the backbone of the song.68
Given the centrality of overlapping distinct handclapping patterns in the en-
semble of both the Icila dance of Zambia and the Bira ceremony of Zimbabwe,
it is conceivable that the African handclapping pattern deployed in the third
movement of Electric Counterpoint is in fact derived from just such an interac-
tion of two different clapping patterns. For example, the combination of a simple
ternary handclapping pattern (such as that notated by Berliner in Example
12.13) and a complex handclapping pattern (such as that notated by Tracey in
the 1960s) results in the makwa pattern notated by Berliner in Example 12.13
(see Ex. 12.14a).69 Another possible combination of a simple ternary handclap-
ping pattern and a somewhat more complex one is depicted in Example 12.14b.
In his theoretical reflections on rhythm formation, Arom depicts a resultant
pattern similarly constructed from the combination of a simple ternary pattern
and a signature asymmetric five-note pattern, which could be understood as the
complement to the standard pattern.70
Afro-Electric Counterpoint 287

Example  12.14 Two derivations ((a) and (b)) of a resultant handclapping pattern
produced by combining two simpler makwa handclapping patterns.

(a)

(b)

Most African music scholars will recognize the makwa pattern (marked by
xs in Ex. 12.14a) as a rotation of the gankogui bell pattern found in West African
drum ensembles (such as the Sogba or Sogo dances of Ghana), which proved to
be a rich source of information for Reich as well. In fact, the seven-note gankogui
pattern appears as the primary module in many of Reich’s works leading up to
Electric Counterpoint. Reich spent considerable time in the 1970s sketching and
transcribing a host of African drumming ensembles, many of which contain this
particular bell pattern—Reich calls it the “Gong-Gong” pattern in his sketches,
while Jones calls it the “standard pattern” in his writings. I cannot elaborate the
full extent of Reich’s engagement with West African drumming ensembles in
this chapter. Here it suffices to say that the particular variation of this standard
pattern first deployed by Reich in Clapping Music is found as a handclapping
pattern in Zimbabwe.
One interesting difference between Reich’s understanding of these pat-
tern types and their articulation in an African context concerns the fact that
the Western composer tends to cast the rhythm into a binary metric scheme,
while the African counterparts, both in Ghana and Zimbabwe, tend to cast (or
even derive) the rhythm in ternary time. Reich betrays this non-African way
of hearing in his notation of both the sketches for—and the score of—Electric
Counterpoint. First, the detached stems of the final two eighth notes of the orig-
inal pattern in Reich’s sketch of the six rotations of Clapping Music suggest a
duple construction of time (Ex. 12.12), instead of a ternary one, as indicated
by the African examples (Ex. 12.13 and 12.14). Second, Reich notates the third
movement of Electric Counterpoint as 3/2 rather than 12/8, thereby subdividing
the basic beat into four-pulse units. Arguably one may speak here of the transfor-
mation of ternary sonic qualities into binary ones—or even the Occidentalizing
of an African temporality—and yet, on the other hand, the diverse attribution
of time signatures itself attests to the capacity for multiple modes of metric en-
trainment inherent to this kind of rhythmic patterning. This formal point needs
to be emphasized.
The striking point about asymmetric African patterns of this sort (also known
as “timelines” in some of the scholarly literature) concerns what music theorists
288 Beyond the West

call “grouping dissonance,” or what should more accurately be called “metric

ambiguity.” Of the three possible ternary groupings associated with the forma-
tion of “compound” time in a 12-pulse sequence, the gankogui/makwa pattern
has the formal capacity to entrain each with almost equal validity. Likewise, of
the two (or four) possible binary groupings associated with the formation of
“simple” time in a twelve-pulse sequence, the pattern can do likewise. In other
words, the seven-note timeline successfully embeds every possible time signa-
ture, whether composed of two-, three-, or four-beat units; or whether begin-
ning on time-point 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, or 12, with near-equivalent
plausibility. Example 12.15 outlines the five fundamental ways meter can be
construed across the terrain of the twelve pulses of the gankogui/makwa pattern.
The quadrilateral layout of numbers (from 0 to 11) in Example 12.15 indicates
the relationship between rhythmic and metric time-points (noncoincidences
are marked in plain text; coincidences are marked in bold) in the context of
differently projected metric schemes. Ternary (or compound) groupings are
demonstrated horizontally, while binary (or simple) ones are demonstrated
vertically. As can be seen, in the context of gankogui/makwa, all possible time
signatures equally vie for syntax formation.
What is striking about this timeline is the way it nests ternary and binary
components across the entirety of a single pattern. In other words, to pro-
duce a pattern that can plausibly entrain both simple and compound meters
(beginning on any time-point) is not simply to symmetrically distribute bi-
nary and ternary elements to halves of that pattern, respectively. The pattern
in Example 12.16, for example, distributes a binary grouping across the first

Example 12.15 Metric ambiguity in the gankogui/makwa pattern.

Afro-Electric Counterpoint 289

Example 12.16 A less ambiguous metric alternative (nesting binary with ternary).

six time-points and a ternary grouping across the second six. Both metric
temporalities should equally lay claim to such a pattern, and yet it actually
depicts a less ambiguous alternative. This is because—while various distinct
meters are clearly plausibly entrained in this scenario—the third of the ter-
nary meters (beginning on time-point 2 in Ex. 12.16) as well as the second
of the binary times (beginning on time-point 1) are distinctly less plausibly
entrained by the pattern than are the others. Despite the fact that the pattern
is infused with both ternary and binary values, these are divided symmetri-
cally across the pattern, thereby undermining the plausible entrainment of
either temporality across the entire pattern. In gankogui/makwa, in contrast,
the pattern is subdivided asymmetrically, yielding a segmentation of <5+7>, a
property Arom calls “rhythmic oddity.” Arom describes this particular form of
asymmetry thus: “These figures are always constructed by the irregular juxta-
position of binary and ternary qualities. The resulting rhythmic combinations
are remarkable for both their complexity and their subtlety. They follow a rule
which may be expressed as ‘half-1/half+1.’ ”71 In the gankogui/makwa pattern,
the property of rhythmic oddity helps explain the uniquely nested and dif-
ferential distribution of binary and ternary qualities, and hence its maximal
metric ambiguity.
In the context of music deploying phasing techniques, such as the Icila dance
music, Mbira dza Vadzimu music—or, of course, Reich’s minimalism—this kind
of pattern becomes a particularly rich resource for the kaleidoscopic distribu-
tion of rhythmic variation. Example 12.17 outlines the twelve phasing positions
Example 12.17 Asynchronous modalities of phase positions.
Afro-Electric Counterpoint 291

of the pattern (right-facing square bracket on the left-hand side of the boxes)
and a clone (left-facing square bracket on the right-hand side of the boxes).
Silent beats are marked with a dash in the box. Note that each phasing position
proffers a unique pattern, thereby saturating the unfolding musical field with
variety. In other words, the first pattern has seven sounded time-points and five
silent ones; the second has twelve sounded and no silent ones; the third has nine
sounded and three silent ones; and so on. The variety is represented below the
box by tracking the “filled beats” across all twelve phase relations. Interestingly,
the unfolding of this variety itself tracks a kind of immanent developmental logic
from seven to twelve sounded time-points (or “filled beats”) at phase position
6. In other words, the unfolding of music through phase positions 1 to 6 tracks
the gradual becoming sound of silences. However, this quasi-telos is not a simple
additive process—systematically replacing notes for rests (first 7, then 8, 9, 10,
11, and 12)—but rather one inflected with a degree of diversity and malleability
(substituting 12 for 8 in phase position 1; and 8 for 12 in phase position 6, for
example). This subtle distortion of the systematic process effectively juxtaposes
sudden contrasts between phase positions with gradual unfoldings between
them. The distortion also effectively postpones the arrival of full beat saturation
by deploying more phase positions than if their unfolding had occurred strictly
systematically.72 One may speak here of the asystematic aesthetics of a system-
atic process; or better, an asystematic systematics.
In phase position 7, the quasi-telos is reversed in a kind of dislocated pal-
indrome. In other words, phase position 7 recapitulates the structure at phase
position 5, as does phase position 8 that of phase position 4, and so on. But there
is an important difference. The recouped rhythmic pattern (the audible resultant
pattern) in each case has itself phase-shifted in a manner that does not reflect
the same phase-shifted relation between the two rhythms (the embodied motor
patterns) that produce the resultant patterns. This is a kind of additional layer
of phasing involving the pattern of resultant patterns. In other words, various
resultant patterns—identical to already heard patterns—emerge in the second
half of the phasing process in a way that is gradually set adrift from their ini-
tial metric coordinates. The striking point about this phenomenon is that two
phasing processes—on the one hand, the motor patterns, and, on the other, the
audible resultant patterns—are thereby going out of phase with one another.
This kind of double phasing is striking not only because a shift in the relation-
ship held by two embodied patterns produces a transformation of the heard
pattern but because the shift in the relationship produces a repetition of the re-
sultant, but systematically set adrift from its initial appearance. Uncannily, the
repetition of the resultant is set adrift by a different time span than the shift in
the time span between the phase relations of the motor patterns that produce
the resultant.
Let me illustrate the point with an example. In phase position 5, the re-
sultant is produced when the original motor pattern is combined with a clone at
292 Beyond the West

time-point 5. The identical resultant in phase position 7, in contrast, is produced

when the original pattern is combined with a clone at time-point 7. A time span
of two time-points (between clones) separates the construction of these re-
spective configurations. The audible resultant pattern of each respective phase
relation, in contrast, is an identical rhythm—identity here is understood as in-
cluding both the actual pattern of long and short tones and the pattern of co-
incidence between parts—shifted by a time span of seven time-points. In other
words, a shift in phase relations by two time-points in the production of the
structure is registered as a shift by seven time-points in the perception of the
structure (see Ex. 12.18).
Understood in the context of the whole process, we find that phase positions
6 and 0 function as a kind of pivot for a phase-shifted palindrome. What is fas-
cinating about this phasing process is not only the strange algorithmic artistry
of the cumulative process of pattern production but also, and especially, the un-
canny algorithmic artistry of the palindrome structure of the whole. An algo-
rithmic logic is perceptually experienced at one remove; we hear sonic ghosts of
a formal process; we listen by way of musical ventriloquism. The dissemblance
and then displaced resemblance between processes of production and their un-
canny perception is a subtle, but central, feature of African music aesthetics.
It is not the place of this chapter to elaborate the important role of ventrilo-
quism in African spiritual practices, except to note that several African mu-
sical practices elaborate phenomenological scenes grounded in various levels
of perceptual mismatch between motor pattern and heard pattern, between eye
and ear, between embodiment and form.73 The relationship between embodied
codes is paradoxically scrambled into a higher-order coherence, producing
resultant figures of errant identity. The phenomenology of an algorithm, one
might say, produces asynchronous sound that uncannily recapitulates its forms
as a thrown voice.
This symptomatic artistic fallout reflects strongly on the nature of the pattern
itself. Although it is unlikely that Reich recognized the extent of its mathematical

Example 12.18 Double phasing relation at phase positions 5 and 7.

Afro-Electric Counterpoint 293

capacities, his music demonstrates a strong sense of the pattern’s formal value.
In the third movement of Electric Counterpoint, for example, Reich sets up some
phase-shifting relations between guitars that reflect the ventriloquist property
outlined here. For example, the resultant rhythms produced by the phase rela-
tion between guitars 2 and 3, on the one hand, and guitars 1 and 4, on the other,
are identical (again, including both the pattern of long and short tones and their
coincidence between parts). As it is with the quality of perceptual mismatch
described earlier, however, these resultants are rotated by a different time span to
the time span shift that generated their respective phase relations. To be precise,
the phase relations between patterns have shifted by a time span of 2 while the
respective resultant patterns have shifted by a time span of 5.
In his iconic essay “Music as a Gradual Process” (1968), Reich argues against
“hidden structural devices” in music and for music as a perceptible gradual pro-
cess. In an oft-quoted statement, the composer claims: “I want to be able to hear
the process happening throughout the sounding music.”74 However, focusing
more closely on a particular African instance of it in Electric Counterpoint, this
idea needs to be adjusted. In other words, the uncanny recapitulation of errant
identity in musical structures such as this adjusts the idea that music under-
stood as a gradual phasing process is one in which “a compositional process and
a sounding music are one and the same thing.”75 Two points mediate this terse
idea. First, the perceptual mismatch between embodied forms and heard forms
in this example occasions a powerful dissimilitude between sounding music and
compositional process. Second, and less immediately apparent, the uncanny
recouping of similitude under such conditions of transformation occasions a
sounding music engendered as if by a different process. In other words, close lis-
tening to the sounding music of a gradual phasing process of this sort provokes
the phantom sense of a distinctly dissimilar compositional process at work. Not
only is the “sounding music” different from its “compositional process,” but to
the extent that the sounding music becomes “the same thing” as the composi-
tional process, it is by way of a phantom perception of the process.
Returning to the appearance of the makwa/gankogui pattern in Electric
Counterpoint, it should be noted that the pitch arrangements do not properly
reinforce the uncanny logic of these phase relations. Neither does the third
movement isolate the possible two-guitar combinations for attention to their
perception. The former point deserves emphasis. Although his mentor A.  M.
Jones repeatedly insisted that African “drumming is not merely rhythmic, it
is melodic,” Reich’s understanding of African musical phenomena is largely
scripted in purely rhythmic terms. His partial indifference to African harmonic
practice, for example, has been briefly noted earlier in this chapter. Furthermore,
a sketch of Ageshi drumming (dated June 26, 1972, housed at the PSS) features
a vivid transcription of the gankogui pattern. On the relations of musical lines
produced by phasing, Reich notes on the sketch:  “These relations have to do
entirely with rhythms—not with pitches.” In the third movement of Electric
294 Beyond the West

Counterpoint this rhythm-centric conception is articulated compositionally—in

other words, the logic guiding rhythmic processes tends to be divorced from
that of pitch processes. This division of parameters obscures some of the un-
canny phase relations the music nonetheless sets up. Perhaps one may speak
here of a subtle and latent “invention” of African rhythmic complexity at the
expense of pitch complexity.76 The failure to recognize the intimate conjunction
of pitch and rhythm in African aesthetics—and the concomitant overvaluation
of rhythmic processes of African music—was a commonplace of twentieth-
century receptions of African music. On the other hand, it should be pointed
out that the layout of the four guitar rotations of the gankogui/makwa pattern in
Electric Counterpoint reflects an application of the African principle of rhythmic
oddity to the phasing process itself. Guitar 1 is separated by two pulses from
guitar 2, guitar 4 is separated by three pulses from guitar 2, and guitar 3 is
separated by four pulses from guitar 4 (and thereby, within modulo 12, by an-
other three pulses from guitar 1). The total arrangement of instrumental parts
thereby reflects the structure <2+3+4+3>, or <5+7>, a subdivision that reflects
the characteristically African logic of n-1/n+1 temporal subdivision.

“Too African?” (Or Not African Enough?)

In his many writings and interviews, Reich frequently draws special attention
to the unique properties of the musical modules he deploys in various phasing
relations. In a 2000 interview with Rebecca Y. Kim, for example, Reich astutely
states: “All those little modules, they have to be gold or else you’re dead.”77 This
statement is consistent with A. M. Jones’s analysis of African music, notably the
“prime rhythmic ‘motifs’ ” that form a constituent element of African music,
particularly of the way they are “built up with mathematical precision.”78 Reich
is keenly attuned to the formal capacity of the gankogui/makwa pattern in par-
ticular. For example, in the Ageshi drumming sketch featuring the gankogui
pattern from the 1972 sketchbook housed at PSS, Reich speaks to the compo-
sitional importance of setting up a “tremendously rich original ‘module’ ” for
a successful phasing process. In other sketches from the same sketchbook, he
examines various patterns and their combinations, frequently concluding that
they are lacking in some way or another.79 In fact, the 1972 sketchbook for
Clapping Music and Music for Pieces of Wood reflects an almost agonizing at-
tempt on the part of the composer to break free from the African patterns he
had used in his compositions up to this point, without forfeiting their delicate
analytic characteristics. But this effort was met with little success. The sketch-
book dated May–October 1972 is replete with variously grouped rhythmic
patterns. Toward the end of this period, for example, we still find diverse
incarnations of a suitable pattern for the compositions to come: on September
18, 1972, Reich notates a two-bar, ten-beat pattern; on September 30, he notates
Afro-Electric Counterpoint 295

a one-bar, sixteen-beat pattern; on October 13, he notates a fourteen-beat pat-

tern subdivided as <4+3+2+2+3>; on October 14, he notates a pithy eight-beat
pattern; and on October 16, he expands this eight-beat pattern to an asymmet-
rically divided sixteen-beat pattern.
Reich’s various attempts to strike “gold” in these sketched modules are re-
vealing, for they reflect an antagonistic concern, on the one hand, for striking
the appropriate mathematical characteristics required for rich phasing relations,
and on the other for their potential signification as non-Western music—“just
so much ‘ethnic’ sound,” in the words Reich jots on a sketch dated August 17,
1972. In his sketch from October 16, for example, Reich is anxious that the
asymmetric patterns he crafted for Clapping Music and Music for Pieces of Wood
sound, in the composer’s handwritten words, “a bit too ‘Latin.’ ” In the ensuing
entry on October 22, in response to his remark about Latin-sounding char-
acteristics, Reich notes:  “So maybe basic pattern progression is  .  .  .” followed
by a sketch of three consecutive patterns in 12/8, 8/8, and 6/8, respectively. Of
the three modules, the first, in 12/8, is the gankogui/makwa pattern discussed
earlier in the chapter. By shifting time signatures, then, it appears that Reich
hopes to resist the “ethnic,” Latin-inflected sound of his previously crafted
modules, without excluding the African one. Interestingly, by October 29, Reich
abandons the plan to shift meters and isolates the 12/8 gankogui/makwa pattern
as the only module to be used in both Clapping Music and Music for Pieces of
Wood. Even so, in a sketch of the module and its permutations on November 25
(see Figure 12.1), Reich is concerned that he “change [the] basic pattern in [first
section] to more neutral [sic],” presumably because he construes the chosen
gankogui/makwa pattern as signifying non-Western music. More precisely, in
words written on the same sketch, Reich is concerned that the gankogui/makwa
pattern might sound “Too African?”
The concern about sounding too African does not fade throughout Reich’s
career. Paradoxically, even in his descriptions in 1988 of the Banda Linda quo-
tation in the first movement of Electric Counterpoint (nearly two decades after
composing Clapping Music), for instance, Reich likewise points out that the
African theme “if anything . . . seems a bit ‘un-African’ ” (in this case because
of its time signature).80 It is as if the African citation itself here accomplishes
the paradoxical objectives of a well-formed non-African pattern.81 Despite the
evident reservation of sounding too African, Reich nonetheless settled on the
gankogui/makwa pattern for Clapping Music (in 1972) and Music for Pieces of
Wood (in 1973). Indeed, the composer deployed this basic module for years
to come, including in works ranging from Music for 18 Musicians (1976) and
Sextet (1984–86), to Nagoya Marimbas (1994), You Are (Variations) (2004); and,
as examined here, Electric Counterpoint. This is hardly surprising given Reich’s
abundant references to and transcriptions of this, and other African patterns in
his sketches dating from 1969 to the end of the century. In a much later sketch
for Tehillim (dated January 15, 1981), for example, Reich asks himself how to
296 Beyond the West

Figure 12.1 Reich’s sketch for Clapping Music and Music for Pieces of Wood (Steve Reich
Collection, PSS).

change tempos in the piece. Reich’s solution:  “Metric modulations modeled

on African examples (analyse recordings made in Ghana for this).” Again, it
is beyond the scope of this chapter to outline the full extent of this engage-
ment with African music in Reich’s considerable transcriptions of African music
in his sketchbooks (which have not been discussed at all in this chapter). For
Afro-Electric Counterpoint 297

the purposes of this argument, Reich’s consistent attachment to a particular

rhythmic configuration seems to indicate a deep understanding and apprecia-
tion of its intricate permutational logic, even if its actual elaboration in specific
compositions at times obscures some of that logic, and even if its elaboration in
specific compositions is only one part of a broader patchwork of African modes
of operation in these compositions.
In conclusion, I would like to suggest that, far from sounding too African,
Electric Counterpoint is not in fact heard as African enough in the context of
its general (popular, legal, and academic) reception. In such a view, the music
refers less to the thematic recall of African textures and tunes themselves than to
the formal assemblage and rearrangement of their abstract elements. Of course,
Jones repeatedly refers to African music as crafted with a high degree of “math-
ematical precision,” and this precision clearly resonated with the permutational
logic of Reich’s aesthetic aspirations.82 Wholly shorn of its African meanings—
notwithstanding the fact that traditional African music is itself a site of complex
formal mathematics—the standard historical tale emphasizes the music’s gener-
ative procedures as abstract-sounding forms, filtered here through latent “min-
imalist” axioms:  reduction of means, depersonalized processes, anti-illusion,
and so on.
The task of this chapter has not simply been to account for historical facts
more accurately and exhaustively than before. Nor is its aim simply a compar-
ative study, descriptively collating and differentiating the aesthetic dimensions
of the “same” music in America and Africa, respectively, accounting for the
variable social effects of its repurposing in a global frame, and so on. In
fact, the stakes of this kind of revision are higher than those thematically
investigated in this chapter. For example, in the context of a global biography
of musical sounds that today circulate in a hybrid of both exchange economies
and gift-like ones, it is imperative to locate points of origin and appropriation
with some historical responsibility, no less than sensitivity toward their soci-
oeconomic place in our contemporary moment.83 To be sure, both concepts
and samples of Clapping Music, for example, have reappeared in a variety of
musical contexts since its “composition” in 1972. In The Sound of Two Hands
(1992), for example, the Princeton-based composer Paul Lansky deploys var-
iously tuned samples of clapping hands to render what he tentatively calls “a
high-tech version of Steve Reich’s Clapping Music.”84 The samples do not appear
to be taken from a performance of Clapping Music itself, but the composition
features a prominent presentation of the African gankogui pattern. Likewise,
in the realm of popular music, David Bowie’s song “Love Is Lost” from his
album The Next Day (2013) is anchored in samples from Clapping Music. The
video of the song begins with the sound of applause accompanying footage of
Bowie washing his hands before metamorphosing into a section of Clapping
Music, performed by James Murphy and other musicians, accompanied by
clapping hands of an eerie, fictional audience. Murphy’s “Hello Steve Reich
298 Beyond the West

Mix for the DFA” was released as a bonus track on the album. The song is de-
monstrably rich in historical association, including a wooden puppet of The
Thin White Duke and a sample from Bowie’s song “Ashes to Ashes” from Scary
Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980). Not surprisingly, Reich is credited on
both the album and the single.
Similarly, Electric Counterpoint has enjoyed a social life beyond the limits
of its own commodity form. In addition to its various releases—ranging
from Pat Metheny’s well-known Nonesuch recording of 1987 to Dan Lippel’s
re-Africanized version on New Focus Records in 2016, by way of Radiohead
guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s performance and recording on Radio Rewrite in
2012—Electric Counterpoint has been used in various other songs and mu-
sical works, no less than other media.85 One instance involves the ambient
house band The Orb, which sampled the ndereje balendro section of the first
movement of Metheny’s recording on its song “Little Fluffy Clouds,” which
peaked at number 10 on the 1993 UK charts; another involves the artist
Ramble John Krohn (RJD2), who sampled the work for his song “The Proxy”
in 2004. Additionally, Electric Counterpoint has been featured in an anthology
of music as an object of academic study, it has been arranged and performed
for drum and bugle corps, and it supplies audio for a well-known video
game.86 In short, the music enjoys considerable global circulation and play in
the afterlife of its initial recorded production. Quite apart from the cultural
repurposing for European and American music audiences of sonic, spiritual,
biomedical, and musical practices found in Africa, the analytics of this chapter
throw the question concerning property—its constituent licensing and copy-
right agreements—no less than its relation to political economy on a global
scale into sharp relief.
A summary account of Electric Counterpoint would include a host of African
music strata, ranging from literal quotations and paraphrases to the application
of techniques and principles. To name only the most obvious, citations include
the Ippy horn music of the Banda Linda people in the Central African Republic
and the makwa handclapping patterns of the Zezuru people in Zimbabwe, while
African techniques include the phasing processes derived from the Icila dance of
the Lala people in Zambia as well as the Ngwayi drumming of the Bemba people
in Zambia, and the techniques for inherent rhythmic-melodic pattern formation
of the Amadinda xylophone of the Luganda people in Uganda and the Matepe
music of the Korekore people in Zimbabwe. These African invocations are clearly
determined by various layers of media and mediation (including typologies of
transcription, interfaces for recording technologies, tape, paper, vinyl, and so
on). However, Reich’s actual compositional deployment of these African compo-
sitional strata ranges from modes that are deeply consistent with African prac-
tice to modes that are wildly inconsistent with it. In short, the music of Electric
Counterpoint is most accurately historicized not as a minimalist work of art alone
but as a creative paraphrase of African music. The seemingly autogenerative
Afro-Electric Counterpoint 299

emergence of unguessed-at inherent musical patterns, for instance, reflects less

the “impersonal, unintended, psychoacoustic by-products” of a neutral music
construed as “gradual process” than it does a mathematically-grounded local
biospiritual practice in the context of a particular African musical cosmology.87 It
is in this context that the music’s inherent values (aesthetic, historic, geographic,
economic) should be assessed. The question is: What are the ideological stakes of
obstructing a classical compositionem africanum from sounding “too African”?

Notes

1. Reich 2002b, 35.

2. In the context of the analytic remarks (on a work written in 1988) to follow,
Reich writes, “I didn’t want to sound Balinese or African, I wanted to think Balinese
or African.” See Reich 2002b, 148.
3. Hoek 2002, 9.
4. Reich 2002b, 149 (emphasis in original).
5. Ibid. See also note 66.
6. Ibid., 148 (emphasis added).
7. Scherzinger 2005, 33.
8. Quoted in Alburger 2004, 3.
9. Jones and Kombe 1952, 9.
10. Jones 1959, 210.
11. Kubik 1962.
12. Kubik 1969.
13. Kubik 2010.
14. Ibid., 108.
15. For an overview of Reich’s materials held at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, see
Matthias Kassel’s chapter in this volume.
16. For a discussion of the constitutive role of African music in the early tape
piece It’s Gonna Rain, see Scherzinger 2005.
17. Reich 2002b, 35.
18. Ibid., 26.
19. Jones and Kombe 1952, 14.
20. Ibid., 15.
21. Jones 1949, 12.
22. Ibid.
23. This reference and the ones that follow are taken from Temperley 2000, 67.
24. In fact, only guitar 4 is not doubled an octave below.
25. Reich 2002b, 36.
26. See Arom 1985, 173; (1991) 2004, 308–9, 313.
27. See Reich 2002b, 149.
28. Personal communication with the author.
29. Arom (1991) 2004, 108.
300 Beyond the West

30. See, for example, Nattiez 1990; Molino 1982.

31. Arom (1991) 2004, 313.
32. Ibid., 173. The spelling of words in the Linda language in this chapter is an
approximation due to the limitations of the Western keyboard.
33. Ibid., 311.
34. Ibid., 309.
35. Ibid., 311.
36. Ibid. Arom mentions only the (highest) horns, the antelope horns, in naming
the first pitch-class family, a point that stands to reason in light of the claim that only
the highest six horns can produce a second tone (1984, 193; (1991) 2004, 309). But it
disconcerts the notion of pitch-class equivalence (implied by the “family” label) be-
cause the corresponding lower horns in the ensemble (horns 11 and 16 in Arom’s text)
are unable to produce the embroidered figures ostensibly characterizing this family.
37. Arom (1991) 2004, 310.
38. Ibid., 313; Arom 1984, 186.
39. Arom (1991) 2004 371–72.
40. It is noteworthy that the module chosen by Reich is more reflective of the
model of rhythmic activity associated with actually performed patterns in ndereje
balendoro (as depicted in Ex. 12.6) than it is with Arom’s analytic model (as depicted
in Ex. 12.5)—a realization nowhere in fact found in the many transcriptions of the
horn variations.
41. Jones 1959, 194–202.
42. Ibid., 199.
43. Reich, quoted in Potter 2000, 169.
44. Quoted in Alburger 2004, 3 (emphasis added).
45. Jones 1952, 25–35.
46. Ibid., 38–39.
47. Kubik 1966, 23.
48. Reich 2002b, 34.
49. See, for example, Scherzinger 1995, 69–88, which explores the paradoxical
appearance of Wagner’s introductory Meistersinger theme out of the logics of varia-
tion in a symphony by Mahler.
50. For example, in their 1961 analyses of kalimba music and the guitar music
of Mwenda Jean Bosco, respectively, John Blacking and David Rycroft describe the
process of melodic oscillation between two tonal centers, separated by a tone, as a
“root-progression.” This affords what Rycroft calls “tonality contrast,” or what John
Blacking describes as the “effect of shifting tonality, although there is no modula-
tion.” See Rycroft 1961, 85; Blacking 1961, 30.
51. Nketia 1974, 147.
52. Ibid., 152.
53. The second inherent pattern, introduced at rehearsal 63, is composed of a
more systematic pass through largely one-beat entities found in guitars 4, 5, and 6,
respectively, thereby drawing attention to the phase relations of the upper voices. The
three consecutive sixteenth-note riffs are particularly relevant to the task of making
Afro-Electric Counterpoint 301

this process audible. At rehearsal 66 the third inherent pattern is introduced—a

calmer variation of the pattern beginning at rehearsal 63 that nonetheless retains the
signature sound of consecutive sixteenth-note riffs. This pattern draws attention to
the phase relations of the lower voices.
54. Where Reich does finally introduce the pitch class A  (one measure after
rehearsal 62 in the bass), he omits from the chord pulsations the pitch class D♯, per-
haps to conjure the color of A major in this section. (Throughout the second half
of the movement, the chord blocks consistently omit one pitch class from the full
diatonic set, thereby creating coloristic modulation effects within a basic pitch set.)
55. Nketia 1974, 163–64.
56. Ibid., 164.
57. Kubik 1962.
58. For more on Reich’s use of computer software, see Matthias Kassel’s and
Twila Bakker’s chapters in this volume.
59. Percussionist and member of Reich’s ensemble, Russell Hartenberger, refers
to the Clapping Music rhythm as one “Steve discovered while trying to find a pattern
similar to the rhythm of the gankogui, or double iron bell from West Africa, used in
several Ewe pieces, including the Atsiagbekor dances” (Hartenberger 2013, 372). See
my comments later in this chapter.
60. Jones and Kombe 1952, 22.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., 26, 28.
63. Ibid., 32.
64. Ibid. (emphasis in original).
65. Berliner 1981, 114.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Jones and Kombe 1952, 7.
69. See Berliner 1981, 115; Tracey 1970, 50.
70. Arom (1991) 2004, 181.
71. Ibid., 246.
72. This discussion draws on Cohn’s analysis of beat-class sets in Reich’s phase-
shifting music. See Cohn 1992.
73. For examples of this important African phenomenon, see Scherzinger 2010;
2012, 84–105.
74. Reich 2002b, 34.
75. Ibid., 35.
76. On the invention of African rhythm, see Agawu 2003. Reich does, how-
ever, view pitch- and timbre-related matters (such as tuning and instrumentation)
as less easily transferred between cultures than rhythmic ones, so the issue is not
simply a matter of his not recognizing African pitch complexity but also feeling
disempowered to appropriate it. For more on this, see note 87.
77. Kim 2000, 12.
78. Jones and Kombe 1952, 9.
302 Beyond the West

79. A sketch for Clapping Music, dated August 15, 1972, notes that the illustrated
patterns in the sketch are “not musically interesting.”
80. Reich 2002b, 150 (emphasis added).
81. Interestingly, what gives the pattern its “African” character, according to
Reich, is the phasing process to which it is subject in Electric Counterpoint, fur-
ther underscoring the composer’s awareness of the origins of the phasing idea in
Africa:  “If [the Banda Linda quotation] has any African qualities, it lies  .  .  .  per-
haps in the fact that the close canon between voices makes it ambiguous . . .” (Reich
2002b, 150).
82. See, for example, Jones and Kombe 1952, 9, 30, 31.
83. In fact, Reich shows demonstrable awareness of the curious (legal) differ-
ence between the materiality of theft, on the one hand, and the seeming neutrality of
immaterial appropriation of labor in the public domain, on the other. For example,
the composer felt that using the iron bells (“ ‘gong-gong’ and ‘atoke’ ”), which he
brought back with him from Accra, constituted a kind of “musical rape.” But using
the glockenspiel instead, even if playing “the Hatsyiatsa patterns . . . I had learned
in Ghana” on them, seems to have cleared the composer of charges of appropria-
tion. In short, Reich writes: “I was free to use [the glockenspiel] as I liked” (Reich
2002b, 148).
84. See Lansky 1992.
85. Dan Lippel’s technical approach to Electric Counterpoint is unique for its re-
sponsiveness to structural behavior of the original African horn music. He achieves
this, first, by inflecting each guitar with a different timbre, as if to assign each in-
strument with a “family” name in the Banda-Linda tradition: tuwule, ngbanja, aga,
yaviri, and so on. Canonic lines thereby both separate and congeal in a less sys-
tematic manner than they would in the context of a single electrically dispersed
instrument. Second, by deploying preparations on some of the guitars, Lippel para-
doxically conjures the timbre of the African lamellaphone, an instrument composed
of iron rods, with added buzzers (such as snail shells and bottle caps) affixed to its
soundboard. These buzzing devices add a snare-like rhythmic component to the
ensemble, and thereby also an element of patterned unpredictability. Last, Lippel
expands the roster of motivic figures by returning to the African source material,
where horn players inflect the signature figure with apparently infinite variation—
held notes; embroideries; added, subtracted, split, and embellished notes; and, above
all, variously felt rhythmic periodicities of the same basic figure by exploiting its
temporal ambiguity. The performance thereby conjures not only an element of ca-
price in its patterned details but also the convulsions of the overall ensemble of the
African original. Lippel’s performance is a story of music as much immersed in in-
tricately patterned form as one immersed in much larger histories of musical exper-
iment and achievement. It is a story not only of electricity and reproducibility but
also of eccentricity and ephemera (see the digital booklet accompanying the release
on New Focus Records, 2016).
86. See Winterson 2016, 65–89; the Bluecoats Drum Corps’ “Kinetic Noise”
(2015); and the video game Civilization V.
87. Reich 2002b, 35.
13

That’s All It Does

Steve Reich and Balinese Gamelan

Michael Tenzer

The new music scene of the 1960s and 1970s manifested both skepticism of and
infatuation with non-Western music.* It was by turns dismissive of its value
and in thrall of its potential to renew. These views roughly paralleled, in aes-
thetic terms, the split “uptown” and “downtown” New York scenes and were the
stuff of everyday debates. The New York Times’ Donal Henahan, uptown apol-
ogist, derided Steve Reich’s interest in such music, saying that his compositions
were “as much fun as watching a pendulum,” and that their basic inspiration
is “Balinese gamelan music, with its . . . slight interest in dynamic variety.”1 As
late as 1996, co-critic Bernard Holland sneered that “gamelan music has no
direction.”2
From their high modernist perch, uptowners mirrored a European critique
of minimalism in the dystopian spirit of German philosopher Theodor Adorno.
Wim Mertens, hoisting the downtown flag in Belgium, dutifully depicts this
view, in which minimalist repetition rejects Western music’s dialectical engage-
ment with historical progress. It becomes an alienated vessel in which “non-
Western forms” were “stripped of their historical context and used as mere
technical formulae and procedures.”3 Downtown in New York, Reich celebrated
the same denuded structures as enabling “a music with one’s own sound that is
constructed in the light of one’s knowledge.”4 As latter-day developments in con-
temporary music eroded the uptown-downtown barricades, modernists’ anxiety
of appropriation gradually receded, in part because Reich’s open-access stance
won the day, thrilling his audience and attracting diverse acolytes. But because
it is the winners who write history, we do owe ourselves another perspective.
The idea is neither to cast uptown-style aspersions, nor to imagine some might-
have-been Reich oeuvre engaging the Balinese and African musics he loves with
a method more thorough and deep than the selective, practical approach he had.

* The author would like to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel. Special
thanks also to Evan Ziporyn for feedback on the first draft.

303
304 Beyond the West

Nor is it to question whether he did or should have done anything other than he
claimed to do (he didn’t).
Instead, in this chapter we observe some modalities of difference between
select features and repertoires of Balinese music, and Reich’s emerging style
during the period he directly engaged with them. On one side, there is Reich’s
“own sound  .  .  .  [and]  .  .  .  knowledge” of Balinese music:  cherry-picked and
shaped by his intuitions, taste, and choice not to advance beyond a neophyte
stage, not to mention his own cultural subjectivity. Juxtaposed are Bali’s rooted
“historical contexts,” with their rich significance for their own public, that Reich
eschewed. A consideration of the differences and gaps between them launches
a perspective that would remain hidden if we only take gamelan tones and
rhythms as free-floating agents available for plucking from the vine. Like the
famous trompe l’oeil of a goblet separating two faces, the differences and gaps
constitute a negative space both empty (because of the truncated relationship
between Reich and Bali) and full (of fallow possibilities).
After studying in Ghana in 1970, Reich spoke of the “tidal wave”5 of cul-
ture and tradition that loomed above him, a wave he was sure he didn’t want
to be swallowed by. Each musical tradition is a vast realm for its experts and
practitioners; Reich entered Bali’s only long enough to sift needed items and
then move on. Which did his studies offer him, which did he select, which not,
and why?

Reich and Balinese Music: 1969 to 1974

In the early 1970s Reich wrote music in which the gradual phasing processes
invented for the early tape music transitioned, after Drumming (1971), into a
music of discrete patterns that maintain strict alignment to pulsation shared by
all players. The use of patterned isochrony, brief periodicities, extensive repeti-
tion, and multiples of the same instrument set the musical conditions Reich re-
stricted himself to in the run-up to Six Pianos (1973), so that he could work out
how to construct the tactile, immersive sound he envisioned. Within intensely
repetitive passages, addition or subtraction of notes within a pattern and the
shifting and realignment of patterns with respect to pulse were the main process
techniques used. In Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ (1973) he
introduced a layer of held chords, in a way reminiscent of Four Organs (1970), to
carpet these procedures. The repetition of stretched-out groups of two or three
chords, and their eventual replacement by similar groups of unpredictably dif-
ferent lengths, added a dimension of flexible periodicity heard against the con-
sistent periods above.
Reich’s affinities for the music of Africa and Bali were stimulated before and
during these years by books and recordings. He listened to LP records available,6
admired the ensemble cohesion evident in the sound, and was moved by sonic
That’s All It Does 305

manifestations of the oral traditions and social bonds that bound musicians to-
gether. He read A. M. Jones’s Studies in African Music (1959) and Colin McPhee’s
Music in Bali (1966), the definitive (and practically the only) texts of the day,
and stated his admiration for their musicological rigor, calling the McPhee a
“masterpiece.”7 In the summer of 1969 the composer copied a passage for four
Balinese crash cymbals transcribed in McPhee into a sketchbook, assigning
pitches to the rhythms. He had mused about composing a “klangfarbenmelodie,
only more Balinese than Viennese,” and soon sketched ideas for a piece (never
realized) tentatively to have been titled “Chandetan”—the term McPhee gives
for the first two of the cymbal parts and their paradiddle-like [AABABAAB]
interlocking.8
In terms of how much Reich actively pursued knowledge of African and
Balinese music, the latter could be seen as having exerted somewhat less of a
pull on him than the former. He corresponded with A. M. Jones and Africanist
ethnomusicologists Hugh and Andrew Tracey about technical matters that later
directly impacted his work,9 though perhaps he would also have approached
McPhee, who had died in 1964, leaving a lacuna for ethnomusicological exper-
tise on Balinese music. Reich elected to go to Ghana and never went to study
in Bali. In his 1974 Writings about Music, Reich devoted a full essay—replete
with transcriptions of music he learned—to the music of the Ewe culture that he
homed in on, but he did not accord Balinese music the same treatment, devoting
only a short passage to it in the “Postscript to a Brief Study of Balinese and
African Music,” and various still briefer mentions of it elsewhere.10 Postscript
was written subsequent to taking a course in Balinese gamelan semar pegulingan
with Balinese musician I  Nyoman Sumandhi at the American Society for
Eastern Arts Seattle summer session in 1973, and prior to taking a second one in
Berkeley a year later, this time on the unusual gamelan gambang, with teachers
I Wayan Sinti and I Nyoman Rembang. Semar Pegulingan is an elaborate gam-
elan of the precolonial royal courts requiring about twenty players, with many
kinds of metallophones, gongs, and drums; the gamelan gambang is a small en-
semble of four wooden xylophones and two metallophones, quite sacred and
ancient, felt to be endangered, and of special interest to the two teachers, both
ardent preservationists. By fall 1974, Reich had finished with his world music
“courses.”11

Concepts That Did and Did Not Filter In

In and around this chronology, Reich’s music tells the gamelan story in sev-
eral ways. Some of its features are common to both Ewe and Balinese music
in a general sense, so it cannot be easily said that he was influenced more by
one or the other. He was drawn to these traditions because he loved them,12
and he loved them in part because they presented fresh contrasts to dominant
306 Beyond the West

art-music currents. Reich conscripted the traditions to assist in his venture of

resistance. Their predominance of percussion, repetition and cyclic structure,
systems of oral transmission, integration of music and dance, and the commu-
nitarian, nonprofessional ethos of the performing ensemble’s closely interactive
musical behavior—all were seen as in strong contradistinction to what was hap-
pening in Euro-American musical centers of the day.13
Some Balinese or African techniques are infused into Reich’s compositions
in idiosyncratic syntheses that make it hard to pinpoint one or the other as a
source. He was drawn to interlocking textures, for example, as we have observed.
Both Balinese and African music (and Pérotin, another interest) use them, but
differently. Most Balinese melodic interlocking generates a monophonic line
from two syncopated parts, often rhythmically identical but displaced (that
is, phased, or in canon), combining to fill every subdivision of the cycle with
a tone.14 If the parts coincide at some rhythmic position, they do so only at
the unison or a consistent fifth-like interval. Even Balinese partner drumming,
using a mix of pitched and unpitched sounds, follows analogous principles
of the seamless fusion of complements into a single stream. In contrast, Ewe
drum interlocking overlaps and interweaves: the parts are distinct, independent,
and stratified; they use different sized, timbrally distinct drums; and together
they engender dialogic clashes of groupings and phrasings—hardly the single
thread of Balinese interlocked parts. Their composite does not always fill all the
subdivisional positions, and different combinations of them coincide irregularly.
Reich invents, selects, and adapts from among these: consider, for example,
the final system of Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ. The four ma-
rimba parts often play at the same time, but where they do not, at least one part
sounds. The parts combine melodically but not conjunctly, their composite fills
most but not all subdivisions, and some parts are rhythmically related by phase
and others not. The composite of the first six sixteenth-note pulses is neatly
filled in a Balinese way, and the metallophone overlaps and extends this dense
texture for the rest of the measure. The glockenspiels are phased with each other
at the distance of half a measure, but their interwoven relationship to the ma-
rimba rhythms is more African than Balinese.
More broadly, exposure to these traditions fueled Reich’s growing convic-
tion that human interaction through ensemble performance was preferable
to electronically made music. Time invested in 1968–69 building the Phase
Shifting Pulse Gate device to help human performers execute gradual phasing
while playing interlocking patterns had proved dissatisfying.15 The machine-
aided precision came to seem self-defeating: “It is actually tiny microvariations
of . . . [a steady] pulse that give life to the music,” he wrote later;16 and further
that “there is, when singing or playing, a complete fusion of mind and body into
music—one is playing music, body and soul.”17 Drumming made it clear that
phasing could be successfully done by pairs of human performers playing the
same patterns, with one player incrementally increasing speed (analogous to
That’s All It Does 307

tape loop phasing). But maintaining isochrony instead had the compositional
advantage of making more kinds of polyrhythmic relationships available, for
greater numbers of simultaneous parts, and accessible to musicians without spe-
cial training in the gradual phasing technique.
Yet Reich also wanted to keep the machine humming, so to speak. He sought
a performance collectivity reliant on repetition at unchanging tempo that was
designed to focus listener attention on compositional process. This led him to
draw from Ewe and Balinese music as though they were canvases of patterns
unfolding on neatly ruled tempo grids stretching to infinity. It was hardly Reich
alone, of course, but minimalism itself that snubbed tempo change, due to neg-
ative associations with rubato, ritardando, and related markers of expressivity
in the European, especially Romantic, tradition. Repetition of a static or slowly
evolving cyclic pattern at a steady tempo was a vestige of the machine idea.18 It
also seems to have been a default way to conceive of repetition, perhaps because
no non-Western counterexamples were evident at the time, or because the ob-
vious ones from Western classical music, like theme and variation forms, were
already guilty by association.
Though he was a jazz buff, improvisation was not Reich’s interest either.
Jazz improvisation is expressive of an individual voice, hence incompatible
with his thinking. He admired the “droning and repetitious” resemblances of
Indian music to the processes he composed but rejected such modal musics
as “more or less strict frameworks for improvisation.”19 Reich also pointed out:
“Musical processes can give one a direct contact with the impersonal and also
a kind of complete control,”20 and in Postscript he asserted admiringly, after
reading McPhee, that “Balinese mallet playing is composed, and allows no im-
provisation.”21 He was not predisposed to envision how improvisation could
be integrated into a collectivity, or ponder the possibility that it is not only in
“microvariations” that ensemble musicians “give life to the music.” It was an
outsider’s response to gamelan consistent with that of Benjamin Britten, who in
the 1950s had described Balinese musicians as sleepwalking automatons, flaw-
lessly executing fixed compositions, and expressive only on a higher, impersonal
plane.22
It served Reich not to see individual expressivity in an oral tradition like
Bali’s and view it as functioning on a higher plane. He may have rejoiced in
the deprofessionalized, depersonalized social bonding he discovered in Ghana
and Bali, and perceived in it an antidote to a soullessness endemic to the
hyperprofessionalized career of the Western classical performer. Through such
a lens, what is ultimately the difference between the depersonalized Balinese
and the depersonalized Westerner? It is that the former is seen to draw power
from the traditional collective and the latter is drained of power as an alienated
modern subject. Therein lies a packed conflation of essentialism, postmodern
anxiety, and Orientalism that Reich was no less liable to escape than any other
cosmopolitan subject of his time.
308 Beyond the West

In any event, strongly collectivized though Balinese music may be, these
calculations do not quite work out. Tempo change and improvisation may tilt
too far in the direction of subjective performance expressivity for Reich to have
assimilated them into his project. But they are nevertheless hallmarks of orality
in Bali and constitute materialization of hard-earned Balinese musical wisdom
and insight. They could only spring from rooted cultural practice cultivated
through lifelong collaboration among performers, refined and passed down
through many generations.
Indeed, there is improvisation (of a particular sort—it isn’t raga or jazz) in
many of the instrumental layers and formal procedures of Balinese music. On
some instruments it is prominent and very much meant to be heard, while
on others it is somewhat hidden, a source of pleasure-in-mastery for the
performers and their co-musicians only. In some genres the lead drummer has
wide leeway to spontaneously alter texture and form,23 while in others even
the detailed, quicksilver enmeshing of interlocking parts can be improvised if
pairs of players have partnered long enough.24 And there is radical flexibility of
tempo at the very heart of gamelan ensemble virtuosity. Repetition and fixed
tempo are often decoupled to the extent that high demands are placed on the
listener’s mere recognition of a repeating structure. Some kinds of extended
compositions have detailed narratives of tempo change wedded to their me-
lodic structures.
Balinese value both sides of the coin: they imbue their music with a freedom
and rhapsodic sweep just as much as they power it with strict rhythms like those
of interest to Reich, and encompass both within their particular world of collec-
tivity.25 They speak of and value tempo as an expressive realm, rubbing against
minimalism’s grain, and see in improvisation an effortless expertise. In the early
stages of learning one must be perspicacious to assimilate these things, but
passages in McPhee do address it clearly.26
Such practices rest on a chassis of melodic and rhythmic structural grammars
with long historical trajectories. We need not call Reich to account for them,
though we are entitled to point out the paradoxes and assumptions he brought
to bear in overlooking them. In the open-minded act of facilitating the West’s
encounter with Balinese music, Reich was unresponsive to the features that
make that music most affecting to the Balinese themselves. However endemic
such misreading may be to cross-cultural interaction broadly speaking, and
however marvelous its outcomes can be (such as in Reich’s music), the phenom-
enon is a familiar case of a non-Western culture donning the mantle of moder-
nity through Western agency, and on Western terms.
Deeper Balinese musical practices are as one with the tidal wave of tradi-
tion that Reich wanted to escape. The fact that that he did so on his own terms
does not mean that he did so fully, nor that the wave’s shadow is erased from
the story of Reich’s relationship to gamelan. One cannot burn bridges without
leaving a trace.
That’s All It Does 309

Reich and Gamelan: Analytical Comparisons

The world of traditional Balinese music is roughly bifurcated along a kind of

folk/classical axis. It can be said to have two lineages: the autochthonous and the
assimilated—that is, music before the accretion of religion of Indic origin (what
is glossed today as Hinduism) on to local animist beliefs, and music during and
after, up to the Dutch colonial rule of the early twentieth century (after this
time, the music morphed at the characteristic faster pace of the modern era).
The older musical stratum cannot be dated precisely but probably spans two
thousand years or more. It comprises ancient animist rituals like cremation cer-
emonies, communal harvest, trance and exorcism cures, and initiations; and it
mainly used singing, wood or bamboo percussion, repetition, brief periodicities,
and interlocking rhythms.27
Later music developed into a family of classical traditions, riding waves of cul-
tural influence originating from South Asia that eventually touched Bali earlier
than a.d. 882 (the oldest written record). A set of text-based practices deriving
from literate Indic cultures and their powerful monarchies, they gave rise to
copious repertoires of voiced—that is, sung— poetry with complex scansions
and long melodies in unmeasured rhythm. Between the fourteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, these melodies were transformed and assimilated into gamelan
music, as bronze-casting technology advanced to enable the construction of the
large instrument sets emblematic of gamelan today. This music is associated
with dance and theater; bronze keys and gongs; extended cyclic periodicities;
ambitious, multisection musical architecture; rhythmically stratified orches-
tral textures with slow rhythms in the bass and quick ones in the high range;
fluctuating tempo and dynamics; and rich timbres produced by the shimmering
of special tunings, instruments, and mallet techniques. Over time the music also
fully absorbed the autochthonous structures, and some of the earlier music—in
latter-day forms—absorbed techniques in the other direction. More or less orig-
inal forms of both musics also continue to exist side by side in Bali.28
As with improvisation and tempo change, Reich was predisposed to value
some features of melodic and rhythmic structure over others. Some genres in the
autochthonous stream fit well with his vision of a dense, tactile, repetitive, and
driving music, but less so the poetry and extended cycles, multipart forms, and
labyrinthine melodies that are part and parcel of later practices. We find these
throughout Balinese music, in the sacred temple ritual repertoire lelambatan,
the court theatrical form gambuh, the shadow play music gender wayang, and
much more. In fact, for most Balinese, the later music’s association with sacred,
royal power and a contemplative, worshipful aesthetic led them to consider such
genres as their most prestigious and profound. That foreign novices are typically
drawn to the rhythmic features of the older lineage is a tendency not lost on
Balinese musicians who have taught them. They are what Balinese musicians
often point to as the reason why initiates don’t “get” how Balinese music “feels.”
310 Beyond the West

As an example of the autochthonous music, consider the chanted vocal

rhythms of Kecak, or the so-called “Ramayana Monkey Chant” that Reich
heard on the Nonesuch Explorer series LP Golden Rain.29 He must have
listened very closely. This set of interlocking, often phase-related rhythms
regulated by a constantly sounding pulse corresponds significantly to the
techniques at work in Music for Pieces of Wood. The LP, one of three de-
voted to Bali in the Explorer Series, was in Reich’s collection. Dubbed with
this English nickname on the album cover, it is one of the most enduringly
“popular” selections of Balinese music in the West. Its teeming, interlocking
texture is powered by dozens if not hundreds of puffing bodies, seated but
constantly in choreographed motion, jolting between explosive and hushed
levels of rhythmic intensity. Reich remarked on this music at various times
and lauds its iconic status.30
This is not a freestanding music but one part of an elaborate theater form
mixing pre- and post-Hindu elements. Kecak dramatizes episodes from the be-
loved Hindu Ramayana epic, with the chorus switching among various kinds of
vocal accompaniment and playing the roles of armies of warring monkeys in the
story’s denouement. Most often seated in several concentric circles, the chorus
interacts with the dancers, who enact the story. Specified dancers lead the chorus,
engaging with them through gesture, song, and cue. Kecak was initially created
in the early 1930s by expatriate German artist Walter Spies, Balinese dancer
Wayan Limbak, and anonymous others, for a nascent tourist trade and—in the
spirit of oral tradition—is even today subject to much variation and experimen-
tation as a theatrical form. But the percussive choral cak rhythms themselves are
an appropriated indigenous element that remains constant.
A full set of cak rhythms (though susceptible to Balinese regional variants, etc.)
is shown in Example 13.1. There are several classes of rhythms, labeled to the left
of the system, with their Balinese designations. The names are given according to
how many onsets of the syllable “cak” there are before the pattern repeats.31 The
resulting grouping structure is also indicated. The various simultaneously sounding
periodicities of the patterns (3, 4, 8, or 16 minimal pulse values) are bracketed above
the parts. (In order to give some sense of a Balinese perception, I have altered the
staff notation so the leftmost rhythmic position lies before the bar line.) Balinese
attest to hearing the strongest position in a cycle as an ending, identifying the be-
ginning as what staff notation represents as the beat’s second sixteenth. The end of
the cycle corresponds to a gong stroke, vocalized onomatopoetically as sirrr with
a strongly aspirated initial consonant and a pronounced rolled “r” mimicking an
actual gong’s intense acoustic beats. For extra clarity in this representation, beams
are suppressed and main beats are shaded gray.32
This beat is kept by a single singer barking the syllable “pung” with a piercing
nasal timbre that cuts through the texture so everyone can orient their pattern
to it. Usually a portion of the chorus sings a melody similar to the one shown
in the bottom staff. Not all of the parts shown are necessary, and only large
That’s All It Does 311

Example 13.1 Cak rhythms as taught by Balinese composer Dewa Ketut Alit in 2001.

and ambitious groups will attempt them all at once. The syncopated grooves of
cak telu and cak nem are normally present and performed in the phase-related
canons shown. Parts are not necessarily assigned in advance, though, and expe-
rienced cak-ers can spontaneously organize into rhythmic composites based on
telu and nem that fill all minimal rhythmic positions. Numerous coordinated
group breaks in the rhythm instigated with cues from a lead dancer, changes of
tempo, and other interpolated textures and continuities complement the drama,
which is after all the centerpiece.
Cak’s direct antecedents include exorcistic village trance rituals called
sanghyang, as well as the candetan cymbal patterns cited earlier in relation to
Reich’s study of McPhee, which are used for cremation rituals. McPhee relates
them to still older, probably original practices:
This polyrhythmic cymbal accompaniment is identical in rhythmic impulse
with the multi-part percussion accompaniment frequently performed to rice
pounding. While women thresh the grain in a wooden trough, dropping their
poles in regular alternation, different interlocking rhythms are beaten against
the sides of the trough by a group of men. . . . Just as each cymbal has a charac-
teristic timbre, so each sound produced by striking the edge, side, or end of the
rice trough has its special resonance. . . . It adds a special rhythmic energy to
the main activity, stimulating the workers as they raise and drop their poles.33
A closer cousin to Music for Pieces of Wood would be difficult to imagine.
Example 13.2 shows the middle section of this piece at the point where all the
312 Beyond the West

Example 13.2 The middle section of Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood with some
notes suppressed (in parentheses).
See also Reich 2013a, 5:01–5:08, for this passage.

parts have fully entered. Each is grouped in 3+2+3 segments, but suppressing
the second of each double clave stroke gives the cak telu rhythm exactly (see the
box in Example 13.1), and the steady pulse is analogue to the pung. Reich assigns
the rhythm shown in the top staff to two players and phases the others in imme-
diate canon (starting one sixteenth apart), just as it is in cak telu, although the
woodblock assigned the pulsation plays at a rate double that of the pung.
Dividing eight minimal values with rhythmic imparity (two 3s and a 2) in a
duple framework as cak telu does is a rhythm trope widely dispersed in musics
of the world, including Africa and the African diaspora. Phasing them to in-
terlock with an audible regulating pulse as Reich does nevertheless points to
Kecak in its specific arrangement. Despite these resemblances there are natu-
rally major differences between the contexts for these rhythms:  the candetan
is not a composition at all; rather, it is a functional set of rhythmic activities
meant for “stimulating the workers.” Cak takes these rhythms as a fixed formu-
laic module and draws on their autochthonous power, inserting them into an
entertaining drama. They are stretched and varied to an extent, but subservient
to a narrative that is a cultural heirloom promoting Balinese Hindu identity.
Reich’s piece is an individual’s composition entailing an invented temporal tra-
jectory and process, meant to engage the listener in distinctive experience. The
rhythms’ deep origins and remarkable journey were never Reich’s task to convey,
and they merged in his mind with other ideas and influences. However mute
they are before their new non-Balinese audiences, as a structure they nonethe-
less encode their particular history, and always will.
Example 13.3 illustrates the third and final melodic cycle (the pengecet)34 of
Sinom Ladrang (hereafter Sinom), opener of the B-side of the 1972 Nonesuch
Explorer LP Bali: Gamelan Semar Pegulingan/Gamelan of the Love God. In 1973,
Reich learned to play the piece from Balinese musician I Nyoman Sumandhi at
the American Society for Eastern Arts Seattle summer school. It is an elegant
music in a “sweet” classical style dating from 1900 or earlier, with a typically
serpentine alto melodic stratum played on the gong row trompong, shown in
Example 13.3 Pengecet Sinom Ladrang as partly transcribed by Steve Reich (completed by the author).
314 Beyond the West

the middle staff. Reich worked out a transcription in several attempts,35 and his
most complete version agrees with my own, made in Bali four years later, also
while studying gamelan with Sumandhi. I have filled in much of the trompong
part that Reich only notated a bit of before stopping. He uses the scale E–F♯–G–
B–C, as it must have more or less matched the gamelan brought to Seattle,
and I retain it in the figure.36 Reich’s interlocking parts (kotekan) are slightly,
insignificantly different than those on the recording. The figure represents his,
my, and Sumandhi’s version. The top staff shows the kotekan as a composite,
comprising the polos part (stems up) and sangsih part (stems down).
The bottom staff gives the evenly spaced pokok or trunk tones. The mod-
estly improvisatory trompong part is constrained to touch on the same pitch as
nearly all pokok tones, typically through rhythmic displacement, as the dotted
lines show. The large gong, shown below the pokok staff, sounds twice during
the tune. Drums, cymbals, bamboo flutes, and a few other instruments are not
shown. Though the pengecet is played thrice on the recording, only the second
playing, at 4:56 to 5:35, corresponds exactly to the figure (the others include var-
ious tempo changes and textural contrasts).
As with Example 13.1, the transcription is laid out to encourage listening as
a Balinese would, for end-accented groups. At every level of the rhythmic hi-
erarchy, the music moves toward the next arrival. The pokok tones are grouped
with brackets below the staff. The circled tones are metrically weighted, the
boxed ones more so, and the two gong tones even more. The kotekan is organ-
ized in patterns spanning one pokok tone, but to convey the end-accented flow
by beaming notes to the left of the beat would make the music too disorienting
to read. Nevertheless, the first note in each beamed group should be heard as the
final note of the previous one. This is visually clearer at the end of each system
where only the first sixteenth of the notated beat is shown, and at the beginning
of subsequent systems, where the following three sixteenths appear.
The thirty-four-note pokok comprises seven groups of four tones plus one
group of six (tones 17–22), whose asymmetry with respect to the whole already
hints at the music’s fluid, vocal origins. The pitch content, at every level of the
rhythmic hierarchy, conveys particular kinds of motion. The gong on F♯ at pokok
16 is heard in relation to that on B at pokok 34. The arrival on F♯ at pokok 8 is static
with respect to 16, but that on C at 26 is dynamic with respect to both 16 and
34; this in turn reflects a general tendency for Balinese melodies to be more ac-
tive as they approach their ending. Hearing the circled notes’ connections to the
squared ones in each system—B to F♯, G to F♯, B to C, and G to C, respectively—
shows more movement at this level. In the pokok’s note-to-note successions we
find mixtures of stasis, such as the alternating tones at 1 to 4, 17 to 20, and 21 to
25, and motion elsewhere. Concurrently the trompong unfolds passages of some
repeating motives (1 to 4 and 17 to 20) to anchor the otherwise rhapsodic line.
The last note of the more metrically stressed kotekan patterns (that is, those
that end on an even-numbered pokok tone) matches the pokok pitch in rhythmic
That’s All It Does 315

alignment and at the octave. Exceptions, in the interest of a shapelier pokok line,
are at pokok 10 and 14. Odd-numbered pokok arrivals, metrically weaker, are
heard as elaborative within the pokok itself and do not align with the kotekan.
There are two kinds of kotekan patterns used: stable and moving—what Balinese
call ngubeng and majalan. This gives them tonal qualities not too unlike that of
harmonies in progression: ngubeng patterns keep a previously established pokok
pitch in focus, and majalan ones transition to a new focus.
In Sinom, each kind is used at numerous pitch levels and in one of two
contours, mutually inverted. The left box of Example 13.4 shows the ngubeng
contours, used when the pokok tone receiving tonal focus at that moment does
not change; that is, two successive ngubeng patterns will always be at the same
pitch level. The upper contour is heard several times in a row, stabilizing pokok
pitches B (onsets 1–7 and 23–25), G (13–15), and C (27–29); the lower one
stabilizes F♯ (onsets 9–11, 17–21, and 32). The tone E never receives such em-
phasis; its omission gives the whole a sense of four-tone modality within the
five-tone space. The majalan patterns escort the music to a new tonal focus.
Shown in the box at right (and with slurs in Example 13.3), the upper one is
employed to move to G at pokok 12, B at 22 and 34, and C at 26. The lower one

Example 13.4 Pattern contours in gamelan and Reich’s music.

316 Beyond the West

approaches F♯ at 8, 16, and 32, and G at 30. The inherent sense of motion or sta-
bility of the ngubeng and majalan patterns themselves is given by their internal
grouping:  as Example  13.4’s brackets show, the former has a 4 + 4 structure,
foldable across a midpoint axis, in which the last four tones invert the first four.
The latter are grouped as an asymmetric and unfoldable 2 + 3 + 3. In a different
expression of flow, there are only three majalan patterns before the melody’s first
big gong stroke (one in the first system and two in the second), as opposed to
five in the second half (two in the third system and three in quick succession in
the last system), indicating systematic accelerated change in pitch focus as one
approaches the gong at the melody’s conclusion.37
Because he went in-depth only on Sinom, it is arguably Reich’s synecdoche for
gamelan. He was interested in the rhythms of the interlocking parts (he stopped
before transcribing the whole trompong part) and created many of his own
rhythms resembling those just discussed. The bottom of Example 13.4 shows
that the ur-pattern for Drumming has inversional pitch contour symmetry sim-
ilar to that of ngubeng kotekan patterns, and there is majalan-like pitch con-
tour asymmetry in Six Pianos. The slow-moving chordal stratum introduced
in Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ and Music for 18 Musicians
(1976) evokes the stratification and longer periodicities of Sinom in some ways,
but Reich’s small harmonic palette does not budge whereas Sinom’s pokok is full
of melodic change at multiple, simultaneous rates.38
It turns out that Sinom is a very particular melodic and tonal creature with
varied internal movement that fatally contradicts any kind of repetition one could
reasonably call minimalist. And, of course for Reich, eschewing directed harmony
and expansive melody was exactly the point. What he heard in the music as being
important turns out to have a tangential relationship to what the practitioners
themselves regard as such. Conversely, the interests of Balinese composers are
hardly Reich’s, but here we have glimpsed a Balinese side of the story.

Not Hearing Across

At a gamelan lesson in Bali in 1977, a time of few paved roads and single-light-
bulb villages, Nyoman Sumandhi told me with pride and excitement that Steve
Reich had studied with him in Seattle, and that he was “a very famous composer.”
In 1973, Sumandhi had been a young lecturer at the new Balinese High School
of the Performing Arts. He was chosen and funded to pursue an MA in eth-
nomusicology at UCLA and became only the second in a long line of Balinese
musicians who studied and taught internationally in the decades that followed.
The opportunity to study abroad was (and is) rare for a Balinese musician, most
of whom are poor and would have to depend on a foreign scholarship or grant.
The very idea of setting foot in the Western world galvanized Sumandhi, but
his remark was nonetheless one of celebrity adulation: he had never heard any
of Reich’s music and showed no curiosity. He was joyously invested in bringing
That’s All It Does 317

his culture to others, its newfound international legitimacy something of a

wonder to him, his MA mainly useful as a rung up the ladder of the emerging
Indonesian academic bureaucracy.
In 1983, when my elder gamelan guru Wayan Tembres was in summer res-
idence with our Northern California gamelan group Sekar Jaya. I  played the
old Deutsche Grammophon recording of Drumming for him. He smiled and
listened politely to part 1 but was unmoved and at last asked: “Is that all it does?
Doesn’t it go anywhere?” A year earlier, on my borrowed piano in Bali, I played
him some Brahms intermezzi and Bach preludes and fugues, provoking him to
laugh them off as muddy and incomprehensible. I thought he might like Reich
more, but I  ought to have known better. Why should a village musician like
Tembres wish to step out of his zone? Reich “loved” Balinese music, and in so
doing demonstrated a willingness to rupture his own identity. Indeed, a precon-
dition for such love is an affinity for the other and a desire to become something
else. The specifics of what is in the music come later. What Balinese of that era,
save for a very few cosmopolitans or mystics, would have gone beyond lip serv-
ice and really wanted such an experience?39 Not Sumandhi, not Tembres, not
others of that time known to me.
It is not only Reich’s Western critics, then, who hear his music as static. Either
Tembres or Sumandhi would hear Drumming in contradistinction to a piece
like Sinom Ladrang and be left unmoved by Drumming’s lack of tonal trajec-
tory. I daresay that later Reich pieces, even those with more harmonic change,
would not move them much more because the elements making their own
music sound organic, feelingful, and alive for them—extended melody, formal
and textural juxtapositions, techniques for shaping tempo and dynamics, and
improvisation—are simply not part of Reich’s palette. Seen this way, Mertens
was not entirely off the mark in terms of unwittingly positioning uptowners as
strange bedfellows with traditional Balinese musicians of the day. They all share
a cultural conservatism, holding—like Adorno—that repetition without suffi-
cient change dulls the spirit. One who imagines that precosmopolitan Balinese
are ideologically closer to Reich than Adorno may wish to reconsider.
What is at stake in any cross-cultural musical experience is not whether a
music is heard as static and muddy or comprehensible and alive. It is a matter
of how (and how much) a cultural agent has an interest in expanding his or her
consciousness. Reich, the consummate downtowner, surely did, for he was an
empowered agent and a beneficiary of the cosmopolitan life. This did not mean
he was empathetic to a Balinese view, although perhaps he thought he was, but
he invented a new music of gradual process that would not have been possible
without the encounter. Sumandhi and Tembres may well have been open to
change, too, in the end, but one can hardly hold them responsible for being of a
time, place, and context that did not explicitly equip them for such an encounter.
Thus it is that the voices of Balinese musicians, and Reich, and their musical
extensions called out to each other across a cultural gap, each landing—unheard
by the other—in the cogs of cultural processes vaster and greater than either one.
318 Beyond the West

Table 13.1 List of recordings of Balinese gamelan in Reich’s collection

Title Contents

1. Bali: Gamelan Semar Pegulingan/ [“Tabuh Gari,” “Gambang,” “Tabuh

Gamelan of the Love God [Nonesuch Pisan,” “Barong,” Sinom Ladrang,”
H-72046] “Legong Kraton Playon”]
2. Monkey Chant from Bali—200 men
[most likely from Nonesuch H-72028,
#5 below]
3. A tape called Balinese Music, from “Frog Song,” “Genggong,” “Gamelan
Nonesuch H-72015 [from The Balinese Gong,” “Barong Dance excerpt”
Gamelan: Music from the Morning of [Pelog Scale E–F–G–-B–C]
the World] [also: “Baris,” “Gambang Betjak,”
“Pemungkah,” “Flute Solo,” “Sekehe
Gambuh: Sekar Leret,” “Lullaby,”
“Gamelan Angklun: Margepati,”
“Ketjak Dance (excerpt),” and
“Gender Wayang: Ansarun”]
4. From Lyrichord ST7194 [Gamelan Gamelan Angklung from Sajan
Music of Bali: Gamelan Angklung and (“Segara Madu”)
Gamelan Gong Kebyar] Gamelan Gong Kebjar from Kedis
Kadja (“Gambang Suling,” with
Suling Flutes from the North)
[also: “Topeng Angklung,” “Kebjar
Teruna,” “Tabuhan Djoged,”
“Gamelan Angklung,” “Kebjar
Hudjan Mas”]
5. From Nonesuch H-72028 Gamelan “Hujan Mas” [also: “Oleg
Gong Kebjar [full title: Golden Tumililingan,” “Ketjak: The
Rain: Balinese Gamelan Music, Ramayana Monkey Chant”]
Ketjak: the Ramayana Monkey Chant]
6. From Col, 6445 or Odyssey 32160366 “Selir” traditional, played in old style
Gamelan Gong from UCLA [The [also: “Baris Bapan,” “Sekar Sungsan,”
Exotic Sounds of Bali: Balinese “Tabuh Teluh,” “Rébong,” “Légong,”
Gamelan Music Performed by “Lagu Délem”]
Gamelan Gong Sekar Anjar and
Gender Wajang Quartet Under the
Direction of Mantle Hood]
7. From???15535 Flute and Jew’s Harp “Tluktak” Genggong Tjondong
dance from Brunet tape via Gordon
Bishop
That’s All It Does 319

Table 13.1 Continued
Title Contents
8. Bali Musique Sacrée CBS 65173 rec. [“Gong Gédé de Tampaksiring,”
Jacques Brunet “Gong Bebarongan de Tatasan,”
“Gong Semar Pegulingan de
Ketewel,” “Gong Angklung
Klentangan de Sidan”]
9. Gong Gde Pudak Setegal Tampaksiring [from CBS 65173, #8 above]
10. Gong Bebarongan Tatasan [from CBS 65173, #8 above]
11. Gong Semar Pegulingan Ketewel [from CBS 65173, #8 above]
“Brahmara”
12. Gong Anklung Kelentangan Sidan [probably from CBS 65173, #8 above]
13. Court Music of the Banjar of Belaluan Side A: Court Music of the Puri of
Sadmerta Philips 6586008 [actual title Peliatan. “Baris,” “Sekar Djepun,”
Bali: Court Music and Banjar Music] “Gambang Suling,” “Pendet,” “Tari
Terompong.”
Side B: Banjar Music of Belaluan,
Sadmerta. “Palewakia,” “Legong
Kraton.”

This list has been assembled from reproductions of backs of reel-to-reel tape boxes in the Paul
Sacher Stiftung, Basel. The labelings are Reich’s. Additional information (in square brackets)
has been added. The original (and sometimes flawed) orthography has been preserved. In ad-
dition, Indonesian spellings conform to the official modernization of its orthography in 1972,
when “dj” became “j”; “j” became “y”; and “tj” became “c.”

Notes

1. Henahan 1969, 1982.

2. Holland 1996.
3. Mertens 1983, 117.
4. Reich 2002b, 71.
5. Wasserman 1972, 48.
6. Research for this chapter was done at the Paul Sacher Stiftung (PSS), Basel,
where Steve Reich’s archives are housed. A list of dubbed reel-to-reel tapes copied
from these LPs is in the archive. See Table 13.1, included at the end of this chapter.
7. Reich 2002b, 70.
8. See McPhee 1966, 81–82. These three items are found in PSS, Reich
Sketchbook [1] (January 6 to November 7, 1969), and are dated, respectively, July
5, June 30, and August 15. It is hard to know what kind of klangfarbenmelodie the
320 Beyond the West

composer may have imagined, but the notion suggests an outsider listening stance
more alive to timbre and dynamics than the hard-to-decipher details of notes and
rhythms. Reich’s ten-stave “Chandetan” sketch does not actually include interlocking
parts, but a music in which a chord, pulsating in continuous eighth notes, is distrib-
uted among players in changing ways. The term chandetan, popular in Bali during
McPhee’s 1930s fieldwork, has since been supplanted by kotekan, which Reich
swapped for once he had studied with Balinese teachers. (In modern Balinese or-
thography it would be spelled candetan, and I use this henceforth. Here and in other
Balinese words below, c is pronounced as in English ch.)
9. See Martin Scherzinger’s chapter in this volume.
10. These remarks were supplemented twenty-five years later in the foreword
written by Reich to Tenzer 2000.
11. Balinese music is taught and learned without notation. One student who
participated in the 1973 and 1974 summer sessions recalled that in class Reich
“wrote everything out and played . . . from a huge long score that spilled out over
both sides of the instrument. . . . I think he might have had it rolled into a scroll”
(anonymous personal communication, June 2015). Jody Diamond, another who
took the course, remembers “unsuccessfully trying to convince Steve Reich not to
use notation in our Balinese gamelan class” (Bogley et al. 2004, 36).
12. Reich 2002b, 69.
13. Reich’s 1960s stint in countercultural California, itself an act of resistance
against his East Coast roots, had placed him in musical situations with like-minded
others—such as playing in the premiere of Terry Riley’s In C and contributing the
repeating high C pulse part. See Reich 2002b, 14.
14. The Kecak and candetan rhythms analyzed in Example 13.1 are not melodic
and therefore an exception; their interlocking rhythms may sometimes land together
on the same subdivision. As will be explained, they derive from an ancient historical
stratum predating the invention of melodic interlocking like that described here.
15. For more on the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate, see Kerry O’Brien’s chapter in
this volume.
16. Reich 2002b, 44.
17. Sketchbook [4] (May 1 to July 3, 1971), page dated June 22.
18. Fink (2005b) has a great deal to say about the cultural significance of mini-
malist repetition and how it parallels characteristic patterns of mass media and con-
sumerism in middle to late twentieth-century America, but barely mentions tempo.
A sole reference is on page 212, where he links the idea of replicable and unchanging
tempo to the “economic and technological imperatives” of the recording industry,
and its need for repeated takes at unvarying speed. Musicians who could adapt to
this demand were favored, and individuality of rendition and performance affect
suffered.
19. Reich 2002b, 36.
20. Ibid., 35.
21. Ibid., 69.
22. Cooke 1987, 320.
That’s All It Does 321

23. Tenzer 2000, 288–304.

24. See Tilley 2003, 2013.
25. For detailed consideration of tempo fluctuation in the Balinese piece Gabor,
see Roeder and Tenzer 2012, 92–97. See also McGraw 2013 for similar analyses.
26. See, for example, McPhee 1966, 66–68.
27. Bali is a province of Indonesia, which declared independence from Dutch
rule in 1946.
28. For a fuller view, see Tenzer 2000, chap. 5. By “original” it is not meant that
they have been unchanged for centuries or more, only that they continue to be sepa-
rate repertoires, with distinct social functions, and are played on special instrument
sets belonging to particular villages or temples.
29. Lewiston 1969.
30. Reich in Tenzer 2000, xvii. In Sketchbook [2] (November 10, 1969, to
February 10, 1970) he writes, amid a series of pattern sketches on January 29: “Voice
Piece, Monkey Chant, Breathing in Sound, A DRUMMING OF VOICES.”
31. Other syllables such as “sek” or “tak” are sometimes substituted for timbral
variety at the whim of a leader.
32. The patterns’ different periodicities suggest the “multiple downbeats” of
African music that Reich has spoken of. In kecak this is not a possibility: the main
beat is clearly materialized by the pung.
33. McPhee 1966, 82.
34. For discussion of the term pengecet, see Roeder and Tenzer 2012, 89–90. For
more on the gamelan semar pegulingan genre, see Tenzer 2011, 92–94 and passim;
Tenzer 2000, 145–82; and McPhee 1966, 140.
35. Sketchbook [12] (March 26, 1973–November 25, 1973), page dated May 31,
1973, and several pages following, including several inserted photocopies of some of
the same pages, on which Reich made pencil additions (Steve Reich Collection, PSS).
36. The gamelan on the Nonesuch LP is tuned differently, closer to D–E♭–F–A–B♭.
37. On the recording, the musicians (from Teges Kanginan village, far from
Sumandhi’s home village of Tunjuk) insert an additional majalan pattern leading to
the fourteenth pokok tone, B, and a ngubeng pattern on B leading to pokok 15 (the
kotekan would thus be exactly as it is leading to pokok 22 and 23 in the third system).
The rest of the kotekan is exactly as shown here, but this means that on the recording
the rate of majalan change is the same in the second and last systems. However,
the third system still has one more majalan pattern than the first, thus preserving a
sense of accelerated activity in the second half of the melody. Such difference is per-
fectly typical of regional variation and oral tradition in Bali, and, within the limits of
musical norms, it is at the discretion of teachers and players to choose among such
details. I preserve Reich’s (and my, and Sumandhi’s) version here, despite the small
difference from the recording.
38. It matters little that all of these pieces were composed before Reich studied
Sinom in summer 1973. He had absorbed McPhee’s book on Balinese music and was
astutely able to hear the patterns in recordings, perhaps mentally juxtaposing them
with similar African patterns. The encounter with Sinom gives a specific Balinese
322 Beyond the West

equivalent for Reich’s comment that his engagement with African music furnished
“confirmation” for his approach in Drumming (Reich 2002b, 67). See also Fink
2005b, 248, for a discussion of this idea.
39. Things have changed dramatically, as one might expect, and there is now a
vital cross-cultural music composition scene in Bali. Since the early 1980s, many
Westerners have composed in Bali, and some Balinese have composed in the West,
usually for gamelan, sometimes mixed with non-Balinese instruments. For more on
the history of recent Balinese music, see McGraw 2013. Even minimalism has made
it to Bali: American composer Evan Ziporyn composed Lapanbelas (“Eighteen”—
an homage to Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians) for the Balinese group Semara Ratih
in 2010; and US gamelan expert Wayne Vitale teamed with producer John Noise
Manis to commission two Balinese composers to create pieces in homage to Terry
Riley’s In C (Manis and Vitale 2012). This resulted in Made Arnawa’s In Deng
and Dewa Putu Beratha’s In Ding—deng and ding (solfège names for tones in the
Balinese pèlog scale) being, respectively, the pokok tones consistently coinciding
with arrivals of the large gong in these works (see https://www.vitalrecords.ws/).
14

“Machine Fantasies into Human Events”

Reich and Technology in the 1970s

Kerry O’Brien

On May 27, 1969, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Steve Reich
unveiled his Phase Shifting Pulse Gate—a phasing machine that he had built
over the past year and a half with Larry Owens, an engineer from Bell Labs.1
In Reich and Owen’s conception, the device would phase incrementally at 120
pulses per measure, or, in a measure of 12/8, 10 pulses per eighth note.2 The
invention of this machine marked a new development in Reich’s phasing tech-
nique: the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate could precisely divide each pulse into ten
perfectly even divisions, synced to an internal digital clock, and then phase in-
crementally from one pulse to the next. Most important, the listener would not
hear an entangled phasing process, as one might hear in a work such as Piano
Phase (1967), because the sounding pulses played against a silent digital clock.
As Reich described in his essay “Music as a Gradual Process,” which was printed
in the catalog for the Whitney exhibition, “once the process is set up and loaded,
it runs by itself.”3 The Phase Shifting Pulse Gate offered exactly that: a system-
atic, truly gradual, minute procession through a tenfold division of the beat,
creating a wave of pulsed sound. This, as far as Reich was concerned, was the
fantasy.
The Whitney concert opened with Four Log Drums, performed by Jon
Gibson, Arthur Murphy, Richard (Dickie) Landry, and Philip Glass (see Fig.
14.1). Reich served as a “programmer,” sending pulses via headphones to the
four log drummers, who gradually transformed rhythmic patterns by playing si-
multaneously with the given pulse heard through their individual headphones.4
Listening back to the recording of this live performance many years after the
event, one hears Four Log Drums proceed basically as notated until measure
5—one of the most straightforward sections of the work, in which the four log
drummers combine to create a solid six-beat pulse (see Ex. 14.1).
In the recorded performance, something goes wrong at measure 4, although
it is difficult to know exactly what happens. Ideally, the composite rhythm in
measure 4 would have slowly and subtly transformed into a solid six-beat pat-
tern at measure 5. Log drummers 2 and 4 should have gradually collapsed their
two eighth notes into a single double stop. However, as Jon Gibson explained,
the Pulse Gate was “glitchy”5—the pulses sent through their headphones would

323
324 Beyond the West

Figure 14.1 Four Log Drums at the Whitney Museum of American Art (May 27, 1969).

Example 14.1 Reich’s Four Log Drums, mm. 4–5 (Steve Reich Collection, Paul Sacher
Stiftung (PSS)).

“hop” or lurch forward and skip a beat,6 and listening to the live recording, one
can hear the log drummers scramble, some adjusting, others holding firm, while
others simply stop. At these moments, the resulting sound becomes chaotic.
After this point, the performance continues with sporadic glitches for another
fifteen minutes.7
“Machine Fantasies into Human Events” 325

Four Log Drums continues without break into Pulse Music, a work in which
Reich operated the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate alone. In this work, oscillator pulses
were audible rather than fed into headphones, hence the resulting glitches were
far more apparent and continued intermittently for the duration of the piece.8 In
theory, Four Log Drums and Pulse Music would have become the perfect mani-
festation of slow, phase-shifting music, since the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate was
governed by a common clock. In practice, however, the gate’s glitches created
such frequent irregularities as to become quite contrary to Reich’s principle of
“music as a gradual process.” Once loaded, the process should have run itself. As
performer Philip Glass tactfully put it, Four Log Drums was “a disaster––but we
all have disasters.”9
Soon after the concert, Reich placed the machine in his home closet and
never used it again. Having spent almost all of 1968 and early 1969 working
on the machine and building his reputation up to this point largely through
electronic music, Reich subsequently swore off electronics and technology for a
decade.10 But although he stopped dealing with the tools of technology—tapes,
synthesizers, and machines—his music was still thoroughly bound up with the
logic of technology and the logic of technique. Reich’s written reflections re-
veal a composer struggling to shake off his reputation as a composer of con-
trolling, mechanical music, and this goes far in explaining the trajectory his
compositions took from the early 1970s onward. Furthermore, Reich’s music
engages with a critique of technology that extends beyond mere machines.
Considering techniques of the body and mind more broadly, Reich’s interest
in—and increasing experience with—yoga practice proves essential in under-
standing the composer’s notions of musical time, compositional control, and
performer freedoms in the early 1970s.
In June 1969, just two months after the Whitney concert, Reich was still
sketching ideas for his Phase Shifting Pulse Gate, but he made a note to him-
self: “The gate is best as instrument, not as programming device for people.”11
Another two months later, again in his sketchbooks, he wrote:  “The [Phase
Shifting Pulse Gate] is still the making [concrete] of my musical fantasies.
The phase pieces for instruments turn machine fantasies into human events.
Needed: a new process for live music.”12
Reich’s new process was Four Organs (1970), a work for four electric organs
and a maraca player who tirelessly played ceaseless eighth notes for the entire
piece. The criticism that followed performances of Four Organs expressed the
already established view that Reich’s music was “machine-like,” even though he
was no longer operating large machinery. Reviewing a concert given in May
1970 for the New  York Times, music critic Donal Henahan remarked acidly,
“Granted the pleasure of knowing humans are doing the job, one wonders if
they really need bother, when machines can do it so much better.”13 A later critic
noted that the “maraca players [sic]” in Four Organs were “relegated to the status
of automatons.”14
326 Beyond the West

Such criticisms were due in part to the multiple publications of Reich’s 1968
essay “Music as a Gradual Process” throughout these years.15 This essay, first
printed in the catalog for the 1969 Whitney exhibition, speaks to a unique form
of control that Reich sought through musical processes. He wrote:
Musical processes can give one a direct contact with the impersonal and also
a kind of complete control. . . . By “a kind” of complete control I mean that by
running this material through this process I completely control all that results,
but also that I accept all that results without changes.16
During his first visit to London in June 1970, Reich was interviewed by com-
poser Michael Nyman, then a music critic for The Spectator and New Statesman.
Nyman questioned Reich about his reputation as a composer of “controlling”
and “machine-like” music. Reich’s response was as follows:
People imitating machines was always considered a sickly trip; I don’t feel that
way at all, emotionally. I think there’s a human activity which might be called
“imitating machines,” but which is simply controlling your mind and body
very carefully as in Yoga breathing exercises, or in playing my phase pieces.
This kind of activity turns out to be very useful psychologically as it focuses the
mind down to a fine point. So the attention that “mechanical” ’ playing calls for
is something that we could do with more of.17
This view is found throughout Reich’s essays and unpublished writings in the
early 1970s. He maintains that a type of mechanical playing is useful, even pro-
ductive, despite persistent criticism. It is notable that this “imitating machines”
critique concerns performance: Reich’s ensemble does not use machines, yet
they are, to an extent, playing like machines. This critique of Reich’s music is
key in understanding his first evening-length work, Drumming (1971).
The first movement of Drumming is scored for four performers playing four pairs
of bongos. The work begins with a single note, which builds to a full pattern in 12/8.
Once the pattern is established, two players phase this pattern until they lock into a
second pattern one eighth note apart. After they have phased, new resulting patterns
arise from the combination of these two phased parts, and in early performances of
Drumming, Reich would sing the resulting patterns into a microphone.
In April 1971, while Reich’s group was rehearsing Drumming, German com-
poser and critic Hans G. Helms came to Reich’s studio in New York to film a
rehearsal of the work for a German television documentary (see Fig. 14.2).18
This documentary was given the title Wasserpfeifen in New York: Musikalische
Avantgarde zwischen Ideologie und Elektronik (Water Pipes/Bongs in
New York: Musical Avant-Garde Between Ideology and Electronics).19
Reich’s Drumming was an outlier in this documentary, since by this point
the composer was resolutely opposed to electronics. That summer of 1971, in
the midst of his Drumming sketches, Reich wrote a lengthy note to himself
examining his relationship to electronics:
“Machine Fantasies into Human Events” 327

Figure 14.2 An image from the documentary Wasserpfeifen in New York: Musikalische

Avantgarde zwischen Ideologie und Elektronik [45:46] (reproduced in New Music: Sounds
and Voices from the Avant-Garde [44:32]).

DRUMMING is at opposite extreme from electronics. There seems to be a ques-

tion of how deeply one can react to the sound of a machine. I used to think that
the sound was the sound + that was that + in a sense I still feel that way, but
more + more as time passes I feel that there is a limit as to how seriously I can
take sounds made by a machine. They may be glorious, but there is something
dubious about that glory. It doesn’t have the emotional depth that purely instru-
mental sound has. —Obviously there is a gradation here between a synthesizer
to an electric organ to a drum. But clearly, a drum is at the extreme end of the
scale . . .
(I have thoughts like “what would happen to my music if all the electricity were
turned off?”
– This becomes more and more an issue.)
What is the difference between an instrument and a machine? There is cer-
tainly something to be learned from working with machines. —My discovery
of phasing process is completely indebted to the tape recorder. But if I hadn’t
made the switch in 1966 to instruments I would not have been able to continue
making tapes. Why?20
328 Beyond the West

Two days later, Reich revisited his sketchbook and returned to this question:
The answer to the last question is that the body is not involved when making
tapes the way it is when playing music on an instrument—or singing. There is,
when singing or playing, a complete fusion of mind + body into music—one is
playing music body + soul. Electronics tend to limit the bodily involvement +
automate that + there lies the essential difference.21
Despite his decision to stop using electronics, critics continued to describe
Reich’s nonelectronic music as being essentially automated; most important,
they continued to characterize it as tightly controlled. In an interview in the
New  York Times in October, leading up to the full Drumming premiere in
New York City in December 1971, Donal Henahan published a lengthy piece on
Reich that discussed the issue of control. In the article Reich commented:
Certain people look at music that is totally controlled, written out, as a meta-
phor for right wing politics. But I’d suggest that the kind of control I try to exer-
cise on myself and others who play this music is more analogous to yoga. These
are two different conceptions of control—the one imposed from without, the
other maintained from within.22
When asked further about his yoga practice, Reich continued by saying that the
yogi’s inner discipline “is new information for us. It’s not like having a right-
wing President telling you what to do, it’s nothing like that, couldn’t be further
from it.”23 Reich’s response here appears unnecessarily defensive. No one—at
least publicly—had criticized his musical control as a type of political control,
and certainly not explicitly right-wing or fascistic in any way, but it was per-
haps only a matter of time before certain critics started to describe his music in
such terms.
In February 1972, while Reich’s ensemble was in Europe touring Drumming,
Hans Helms’s German documentary Wasserpfeifen in New  York aired on
WDR, West German Television. The documentary included interviews with
John Cage, Earle Brown, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier, David
Behrman, Thais Lathem, Philip Glass, Benjamin Patterson, Morton Subotnik,
and Max Neuhaus—all American composers then steeped in the creation of
electronic music. It also included Steve Reich’s Drumming rehearsal. In addi-
tion to interviews and performance excerpts, the documentary included an ex-
tensive spoken commentary by the director. The overarching thesis of Helms’s
documentary was as follows: American avant-garde composers were hopelessly
compromised by the uniform, mass-produced, efficient, and indifferent nature of
electronic music manufacturing. He argued that uniform production processes
produced uniform musical results. The sounds that composers could create were
necessarily beholden to the sounds that electronic manufacturing companies
would allow them to create. Despite counterarguments from Gordon Mumma
and David Tudor—composers who built their own electronics—director Helms
“Machine Fantasies into Human Events” 329

maintained his convictions. In the most dramatic moment in the documentary,

Helms summarizes the conditions for musical practice in New York as follows:
The music must be performed by few musicians for economic reasons, best by
the composer himself and with his own instruments or devices, because the
concerts take place almost without exception in museums, university spaces
or churches, but not in concert halls. The instruments should be electronic
or electronically powered to fill large spaces and to drown out the street noise
or subway noise. The works should also have little musical development to
conform with the prevailing fascist ideology of ahistorical arbitrariness and
invariance.24
Helms’s hyperbolic opinions were noted as such at the time. A staff writer for
Der Spiegel called his conclusions “sometimes plausible but usually frantically
interpreted.”25 Although Helms’s critique aimed broadly at the condition of all
American avant-garde composers at the time, other German critics made this
critique explicitly about Reich. In her work on the reception of American exper-
imental music in West Germany, Amy Beal has written at length about Reich’s
1972 Drumming tour. As she has noted, numerous German critics equated
Drumming with “musical fascism.” This critique was leveled at the composer’s
music for two main reasons: either the performance style of the players looked
machine-like and controlled, or the actual music sounded machine-like and
controlled.26 Importantly, though, these critiques were not so much about tech-
nology per se but about the logic of technology—a logic of ultimate efficiency,
uniformity, indifference, and control.
In the May 1972 issue of Artforum, art critic Emily Wasserman again posed
the question of control in relation to performer freedom. Reich responded:
By voluntarily giving up the freedom to do whatever comes to mind, we are, as
a result, free of all that momentarily comes to mind. The extreme limits used
here then have nothing to do with totalitarian political controls imposed from
without, but are closely related to yogic controls of the breath and mind.27
In such discussions, critics repeatedly pointed to this issue of control, but Reich
persistently maintained that it is an inner, bodily control like yoga. It was ap-
propriate, then, that Reich’s next composition would be composed for “no
instruments beyond the human body.” In an interview in 1973, Reich explained
this compositional move, describing Clapping Music (1972) as “[involving] no
instrumentation at all, just clapping hands. I wanted to get all the way back to
people.” Later on, the interviewer noted that Reich was always quick to mention
that the instrumentation was “totally acoustical—no electronic devices.”28
In January 1974, Reich returned to Germany, performing some of his new,
“totally acoustical” music but also programming older works such as Four
Organs and Drumming. The German criticism continued along predictable
lines, prompting articles such as “Musiker am Fließband” (“Musicians on the
330 Beyond the West

Assembly Line”). Reviewing a performance in Stuttgart, critic Manfred Gutscher

wrote that “rhythmic patterns are punched out, hammered, reproduced so arbi-
trarily, so that the idea of a factory and production lines results quite naturally.”29
During this Stuttgart performance, Reich was hosted by composer and con-
ductor Clytus Gottwald, who soon published in Melos the most extensive criti-
cism of Reich’s music to date. In this article, Gottwald leveled all of the (by then)
predictable criticisms of Reich’s music, stating:
The overhanging microphones and the cable wires running to the amplifiers
also draw attention to the technological, indeed industrial, aspect of the oper-
ation. The monotony of this here work-in process by no accident calls to mind
the assembly line: always the same ordered steps produce always the same re-
sult. . . . [Reich’s music] reflects the neuroses of the machine age.30
In the next issue of Melos (May–June 1975), Reich’s lengthy response was
published in the form of an “open letter,” wherein the composer stated:
Please think very carefully about these “social implications” and perhaps
you will begin to wonder who is “industrial” and “mechanical”—those with
oscillators, modulators, synthesizers, digital gates and sequencers; —or those
who use their bare hands and pieces of wood? Drumming quite obviously uses
drums (possibly the oldest instrument in the world) made of skin (animal);
marimbas made of wood (vegetable); and glockenspiels made of metal (min-
eral); and to these are added the human voice and piccolo. And you want to tell
me that this suggests the factory and industry?31
In Reich’s view, these criticisms seemed to revolve around the issue of instru-
mentation, but what was being addressed in many of these reviews was the no-
tion that technology was not defined by mere things—oscillators, modulators,
synthesizers—but rather by the imperatives that lay behind them. As historians
of technology such as Fred Turner and Anne Collins Goodyear have observed,
the fraught ambivalence surrounding technology in the late 1960s was not just
a reaction to technological objects but rather a reaction to the ideology that lay
behind the logic of technology—the logic of maximum efficiency, productivity,
uniformity, and control—and, most important, technology’s relation or indiffer-
ence to human involvement.32
The logic of technology, many critics argued, was becoming pervasive in
all spheres of human activity, including social and political relations. In 1969,
Theodore Roszak theorized this as the “technocracy”:
By the technocracy, I  mean that social form in which an industrial society
reaches the peak of its organizational integration. It is the ideal men usually
have in mind when they speak of modernizing, up-dating, rationalizing, pla-
nning. Drawing upon such unquestionable imperatives as the demand for
efficiency, social security . . . the technocracy works to knit together the anach-
ronistic gaps and fissures of industrial society.33
“Machine Fantasies into Human Events” 331

Roszak was channeling a broad critique that went by many names; while he
termed it “technocracy,” Alain Touraine called it “programmed society,”34 and
Herbert Marcuse35 and Jacques Ellul spoke of a “technological society.” In Ellul’s
formulation, “technological society” was not the product of mere machines but
again the logic of control that animates machines. Ellul clarified this notion of
technique:
The term technique, as I use it, does not mean machines, technology, or this or
that procedure for attaining an end. In our technological society, technique is
the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency . . . in
every field of human activity.36
Technique had pervaded every sphere of human activity on a mass scale incom-
patible with individual experience; technique, as Ellul saw it, was out of con-
trol. Lewis Mumford called this all-encompassing situation the “megamachine,”
which operated “without regard for human needs or human purposes.”37 How,
then, was one to react? As historian Fred Turner has argued, one response within
the postwar counterculture was to turn tools and techniques “inward, toward
questions of consciousness and interpersonal intimacy, and toward small-scale
tools.”38 In this way, as Erik Davis has written, the dreams of technique, though
redirected, were still very much alive:

Alongside their embrace of certain technologies, the hippies must also be

seen as revising, rather than rejecting, the dreams of technique. Freaks
created an entire mythos around self-empowering tools and instrumental
skills, an organic and imaginative transformation of technical manipulation
that is nowhere more evident than in the generation’s powerfully innovative
spirituality. Rejecting the arid and authoritarian religious institutions of the
West, the freaks decided to get their mystical hands dirty, to pry open the
human sensorium and uncover what was inside. Which is why, from yoga,
to psychedelics, from the Kama Sutra to the I Ching, countercultural spiritu-
ality is characterized by nothing so much as techniques, especially what Mircea
Eliade called “techniques of ecstasy.”39

It was this notion of technique that Reich repeatedly bowed to in criticisms of

his music. Was control in Reich’s music the same as “imitating machines”? No,
Reich maintained; it was like “controlling your mind and body very carefully
as in Yoga breathing exercises.”40 Did his music exert an odious type of external
control, like “right-wing politics”? No, Reich insisted on an inner control sim-
ilar to yoga, a control “maintained from within.”41 Did the loss of freedom in
performing Reich’s music relate to “totalitarian political controls”? No, Reich
asserted, they “are closely related to yogic controls of the breath and mind.”42
Finally, when Gottwald once again compared Reich’s music to a Fließband—an
assembly line—Reich responded:  no. Instead, his music was “meditative and
ecstatic.”43
332 Beyond the West

Reich repeatedly and insistently maintained that he was concerned with a

type of inner control, often comparing it to yoga. Numerous scholars of Reich’s
music have only briefly noted this and have neglected to address the matter
in depth, perhaps because the history of yoga in America is incredibly varied
and complex.44 As yoga historian Stefanie Syman notes, “Yoga is so massive
and complicated, so contradictory and baroque, that American society has
been able to assimilate any number of versions of it, more or less simultane-
ously.”45 As a result, it becomes difficult to know exactly what Reich meant by
“yoga” when making references to it. Writing in 1974, Reich explained that he
had been practicing hatha yoga and Prāṇāyāma since 1966.46 He also taught
yoga to a number of friends, including Ramon Sender, Laura Dean, and Russell
Hartenberger.47 Although postural yoga (Āsana) is best known in America, it
is clear that Reich practiced other limbs of yoga.48 Hartenberger, a longtime
member of Reich’s ensemble, recalled learning yoga from Reich following late
night Drumming rehearsals:
In the morning, after we both woke up, Reich and I did yoga together. Reich
explained that the type of yoga he practiced was called hatha yoga, and that it
involved postures, breathing exercises, and meditation. He and I  put towels
on the floor and went through his set of exercises together beginning with
the salute to the sun and progressing to the last posture, the headstand. We
would end the sessions with breathing exercises which we would do in groups
of eight and in the ratio of 1 : 4 : 2—breathing in through one nostril for 8
counts, holding for 32 counts, then breathing out through the other nostril for
16 counts.49
As one of the six orthodox schools of classical South Asian philosophy, yoga
was systematized in early texts, such as the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, and the
Hatha Yoga Pradipikâ is one foundational text for Hatha Yoga in particular. Both
the Sūtras and the Pradipikâ have attracted many glosses, commentaries, and
expositions over the years, creating a sizable corpus of subsidiary texts to those
early sutras. In addition, many mass-marketed yoga books were published in the
United States in the 1950s and 1960s, including supplemental commentaries,
exercise programs, and self-help guides.50
There are certain general characteristics that Reich’s music shared with
yogic practice, particularly techniques that offer control of the body and
mind. Hatha yoga is often defined most simply as a collection of techniques.
For instance, Alain Daniélou writes in Yoga:  The Method of Re-integration
(1991 [1949]): “Hatha yoga is the name given to the technical practices and
disciplines by which the body and the vital energies can be brought under
control.”51
A deeper reading of certain texts in the yoga literature helps to illuminate
some of the more enigmatic lines of Reich’s essays, particularly his founda-
tional text, “Music as a Gradual Process.” Toward the end of Reich’s essay, after
“Machine Fantasies into Human Events” 333

describing notions of compositional control, he describes the effects of listening

to a gradual musical process:
Listening to an extremely gradual musical process opens my ears to it, but it al-
ways extends farther than I can hear, and that makes [it] interesting to listen to
that musical process again. That area of every gradual (completely controlled)
musical process, where one hears the details of the sound moving out away
from intentions, occurring for their own acoustic reasons, is it.52
The essay concludes:  “While performing and listening to gradual musical
processes one can participate in a particularly liberating and impersonal kind of
ritual. Focusing in on the musical process makes possible that shift of attention
away from he and she and you and me outwards towards it.”53
When considered within the tradition of Western classical music composi-
tion, “Music as a Gradual Process” is cryptic. What is it? However, considered
within a much broader corpus of techniques of the body and mind, and
techniques of liberation, Reich’s text takes on an uncanny sense of familiarity.
Consider, for instance, Mircea Eliade’s explanation of liberation in his text
Yoga: Immortality and Freedom:
For let us imagine the life of a “liberated” person. He will continue to act . . . but
this activity is no longer his; it is objective, mechanical, disinterested—in short,
it is not performed in view of its “fruit.” When the “liberated” man acts, he is
not conscious of an “I act” but of an “it acts”; in other words, he does not draw
the Self into a psychophysical process.54
Most simply, Eliade defines yoga as “the means of attaining to Being, the effec-
tual techniques for gaining liberation. This corpus of means constitutes Yoga
properly speaking.”55
In his dissertation on the politics of race and liberation in Reich’s works of
the mid 1960s, Sumanth Gopinath has also pointed to a yogic form of eman-
cipation to contextualize “Music as a Gradual Process,” and he characterizes
this yogic liberation as necessarily stifling the human individual in pursuit of a
higher abstract liberation.56 However, it is crucial to understand the centrality
of the physical body in the practice of hatha yoga. Historians of yoga have re-
peatedly pointed to hatha yoga’s tantric origins and its characteristic emphasis
on the physical body as the site of transcendence.57 Historian of religion Jeffrey
Kripal points to a broad countercultural shift in the American reception of
Asian religions, a reception that tended toward tantric forms of both Hinduism
and Buddhism in the 1960s and 1970s. Such tantric traditions, Kripal argues,
insist on the fundamental unity of the immanent and the transcendent, and so
liberation is not at all abstract, and the body is not suppressed. Rather, in hatha
yoga, liberation is considered to be a matter of full embodiment.58
Beyond a technique of liberation, Reich repeatedly emphasizes the im-
personal nature of his musical processes, and this notion of impersonality is
334 Beyond the West

common in yogic literature and practice. One example is a commentary on the

Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali by Swami Krishnanada, which took the form of lectures
given in the mid-1970s. In reference to the fourth pada (or chapter) of the Yoga
Sūtras, Krishnanada stated:
[Tackling the problem of karma] amounts to saying that we have to raise our-
selves to an impersonal state gradually; and yoga is nothing but that. Ultimately,
we have to become the most impersonal of things—that is purusha. Purusha is
not man. It is the impersonal Reality, and that is the goal of yoga; and we are
moving towards it, we are approximating towards it, we are tending towards
it, we are aspiring for it, and our aim is only that. Therefore, every step in our
effort is a purification of ourselves towards this higher impersonality—though
it comes gradually.59
Throughout the early 1970s, Reich repeatedly insisted that his music was
akin to a technique of the body and mind, even as his critics most often
likened the music to industrial machines, like assembly lines. The logic of
the machine, however—that insatiable quest for productivity, efficiency, and
control—appears much earlier in the history of technology. Lewis Mumford
argued that the logic of the machine could be traced back to the mechanical
clock: “The clock, moreover, is a piece of power-machinery whose ‘product’
is seconds and minutes:  by its essential nature it dissociated time from
human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of math-
ematically measurable sequences:  the special world of science.”60 Mumford
suggested that the mechanical clock privileged abstract time over lived daily
experience:
When one thinks of a day as an abstract span of time, one does not go to
bed with the chickens on a winter’s night: one invents wicks, chimneys, lamps,
gaslights, electric lamps, so as to use all the hours belonging to the day. When
one thinks of time not as a sequence of experiences, but as a collection of
hours, minutes, and seconds, the habits of adding time and saving time come
into existence. Time took on the character of an enclosed space: it could be
divided, it could be filled up, it could then be expanded by the invention of
labor-saving instruments.
Abstract time became the new medium of existence. Organic functions
themselves were regulated by it: one ate, not upon feeling hungry, but when
prompted by the clock: one slept, not when one was tired, but when the clock
sanctioned it. A generalized time-consciousness accompanied the wider use of
clocks: dissociating time from organic sequences.61
The clock, a technology for organizing time, morphed into a “new medium
of existence.”62 But in Mumford’s view, the object, the clock, was not to blame;
it was this shift in consciousness that privileged abstractions over individual
experience.
“Machine Fantasies into Human Events” 335

Whether termed the “megamachine,” the “technical state of mind,” or the

“technocracy,” this was technique on a mass scale: total abstraction from human
involvement and human experience. This explains precisely why techniques of
the body and mind became so attractive; practices like Yoga and meditation can
be tethered to concrete individual experiences.
In Reich’s concluding refutation to Gottwald’s criticisms, he ends his essay
with a postscript remark:
My new work-in-progress for a New Orchestra will be even richer in sound
and will use violin, cello, two clarinets, 6 female voices, 4 pianos, 4 marimbas,
2 xylophones, and 1 metallophone. I am afraid it will make your “industrial-
mechanical” image extremely inappropriate—even more out of place than it
is right now. But perhaps after reading all this you will have begun to wonder
if you have in fact given this image to the wrong composer in the first place
and that the “social implications” of my music, of which you are so concerned,
might actually turn out to be particularly humane and well suited to this time
of our life on earth.63
Reich’s work for a New Orchestra would eventually be titled Music for 18
Musicians. At a work-in-progress concert in May 1975, critic John Rockwell
noted a new element in Reich’s style:  the opening sequence of eleven chords
presents “swelling and receding in time to human breathing.”64 In Reich’s pro-
gram notes for the Music for 18 Musicians’ premiere, the composer wrote:
Rhythmically there are two basically different kinds of time occurring simulta-
neously in Music for 18 Musicians. The first is that of a regular rhythmic pulse
in the pianos and mallet instruments that continues throughout the piece. The
second is the rhythm of the human breath in the voices and wind instruments.
The entire opening and closing sections plus part of all sections in between
contain pulses by the voices and winds. They take a full breath and sing or play
pulses of particular notes for as long as their breath will comfortably sustain
them. The breath is the measure of the duration of their pulsing.65
This indication for breath is present in the original manuscript with the simple
indication “one breath” visually presented as a cascading series of pulses (see
Ex. 14.2).
This element is now almost completely lost in the Boosey & Hawkes edi-
tion, which uses a simple asterisk on the first page to indicate “in one breath.”66
However, one of the most striking features of Reich’s early manuscript copies
for Music for 18 Musicians is just how many indications there are in the score of
when and how to breathe (see Ex. 14.3).
The opening “Pulses” section progresses event by event—one series of
breaths prompts the next series of breaths. There is an audible difference in
two approaches to time: first, the ceaseless pulse in the keyboards; second, the
cascading series of breaths.
336 Beyond the West

Example  14.2 Music for 18 Musicians manuscript [2/10], p.  1, mm. 1–8 (Steve Reich
Collection, PSS).

Example 14.3 Music for 18 Musicians manuscript [2/10], p. 84, mm. 577–82 (Steve Reich
Collection, PSS).

In the opening “Pulses” section of Music for 18 Musicians, Reich inscribed

human measure into his music: breath, a unit of measure inextricable from the
human body. There was a time when common units of measure were bound
up in the body—what we today call anthropic units. There was a time when
distance, for instance, was judged by paces—how many physical steps one
might take (a mile indicating a thousand pairs of paces). But with countless
“Machine Fantasies into Human Events” 337

technologies—the clock, the train, the assembly line, the Phase Shifting Pulse
Gate—in the quest of efficiency, productivity, and control, time and space
were reconfigured and fundamentally detached from the measures of humans.
That fundamentally modern impulse, as Norman Mailer would phrase it, “that
Faustian urge to conquer time by mastering nature,” took hold as measure was
abstracted from man and nature.67 It took hold, as Lewis Mumford had it, with
the “clank of the clock.”68
In critiques of Reich’s music—critiques of the controlling assembly-line-like
nature of his music—it was not technique per se but technique’s indifference to
humans, to performers, and to the body. Reich held this concern from the be-
ginning, as well, but with Music for 18 Musicians he challenged that criticism
musically by employing a unit of measure inseparable from the body: breath.
Within yogic philosophy the breath is a fixed measure of being; since each
person is granted a predetermined number of breaths in life, practitioners who
learn to extend their breath also learn to extend their life.69
Reich’s musical employment of breath and his broader pursuit of yoga, how-
ever, was no safe haven from the mechanized state of mind decried by critics of
the technocracy. Rather, within its myriad postwar incarnations and translations,
modern postural yoga was often infused with the same ideals of technocratic
mastery and control. In a popular book like Yoga and Health (1953), which un-
derwent numerous editions and reissues, the authors make repeated appeals to
achieving mastery over the body through “absolute control.” In some postwar
interpretations, yogic principles offered no escape from technical mastery, only
a transmutation and internalization of such techniques of control.70
The criticisms did not end with the success of Music for 18 Musicians. As
Reich noted, underneath the waves of the human breath remained the constant
pulsing of the keyboard instruments. Writing for the Village Voice following
the Music for 18 Musicians premiere, composer and critic Tom Johnson asked,
“Steve Reich: exerting too much control over his musicians?,” adding, “Now, as
I watch Reich’s musicians going through their paces with such precision, I can’t
help noticing that they look even more machine-like than players in a tradi-
tional symphony orchestra.”71
In terms of the music, Johnson latched on to the ceaseless pulse in the
keyboards, noting that “the tempo was about as steady as an Accutron watch.”72
Of course, Johnson compares this pulse to a watch—a clock. The clock represents
an orientation toward time that is uniform—every second, every minute, every
pulse is perfectly equal and perfectly indifferent. That ceaseless and character-
istic pulse would continue to attract criticism.
In his recent book Present Shock, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff makes a
useful distinction between two basic orientations toward time by drawing on the
Greek words chronos and kairos. Whereas chronos captures our contemporary
notion of clock time, kairos more accurately translates to English as “timing”—
that particular instant when it is just the right moment to act.73 In Music for
338 Beyond the West

18 Musicians, Reich embedded kairos and “timing” into his music. A  singer
sustains her voice not for ten or twelve equal beats but however long her breath
will take her, and the next entrance by the bass clarinet is a question of timing—
completely relational to when the women’s voices fades out. This turn in Reich’s
music is remarkable; just seven years prior, Reich had built a chronos machine—
the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate—120 perfectly even divisions of a bar, synced to
an internal digital clock. The criticisms of Reich’s music throughout the early
to mid-1970s concerned that type of clock logic and its indifference to human
parameters and human input. The kairos in Music for 18 Musicians is not clock
logic; breath is body logic.
By 1974, Reich’s yoga practice had begun to overlap with his rediscovery of
his Jewish heritage. It was natural, then, for Reich to find connections among
his practices.74 In an interview describing this period, Reich recalled:  “I re-
member when I first got interested in [Judaism] I did the first thing anybody
who had been doing ten years of Hatha yoga, which I had done, and [prana-
yama]—I went and bought a book on Kabbalah published by Straight Arrow
Press, which publishes Rolling Stone.”75 This book, Charles Poncé’s Kabbalah,
is notable for its lengthy comparisons of kabbalah to yoga and meditation,
and the author even writes of a “yoga of the Kabbalah.” Pointing to Abraham
Abulafia, Poncé notes that this medieval Kabbalist “not only laid down rules of
body posture for the student to follow during his meditations on the Sefiroth,
but a breathing discipline as well—a discipline found at the heart of every
yogic system.”76
While the focus on breathing came to the fore in Music for 18 Musicians,
Reich considered incorporating breath into his music at a much earlier date.
Writing in his sketchbook in August 14, 1971, he states:
While doing yoga this morning I thought of a piece where a huge drum would
pulse at about the same rate as heart beat—60–72 and low wind or brass
instruments would play long slow tones for a full breath so that the analogy of
breathing + heartbeat would be clear.
If the tempo were very slow, say 56–60, players could sing or play low
tones for 12 beats and [breathe] in for 4 or 6 beats. This would make [the] piece
a breathing exercise. Depending on where people breathe out and in, their
phase relation, different harmonies could be created.77
In this technique, Visama Vṛtti Prāṇāyāma, inhalation and exhalation are of
unequal lengths.78 It appears in Reich’s sketches that his impulse to fuse his
spiritual and musical practice had been present for some time. And, indeed,
throughout more than ten years of practice, Reich’s study of yoga was thor-
oughly enmeshed in his working thoughts and processes; it infused his writings,
his sketches, and his interactions with fellow musicians, and it affected his com-
positional style and aesthetic. The thread that connected his experiments with
the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate up until Music for 18 Musicians was technique,
“Machine Fantasies into Human Events” 339

particularly techniques of control. Though he put his machine in a closet in

1969, these techniques of control prevailed throughout his work during this
period. Whether he was controlling knobs on a Phase Shifting Pulse Gate or
controlling his breathing through Prāṇāyāma, Reich’s fantasies, it turned out,
extended beyond machines. Although the clock-like chronos would continue
ticking in his music, the kairos of breath worked to forge new fantasies.

Notes

1. Reich and Owens worked together through the organization Experiments in

Art and Technology (E.A.T.). For an early history of the organization, see O’Brien
(2018). Reich previewed the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate at a concert at the New School
in April 1969. See Reich 1969b.
2. Reich 1974, 17–27.
3. Reich 1969a.
4. In his proposal to Experiments in Art and Technology, Reich wrote, “The
gate can also be used as a phase variable metronome to ‘program’ live performers. . . .
When the ‘conductor programmer’ shifts the phase relations between the channels
each performer receives a shifted pulse which he follows thus producing com-
plex rhythmic melodic patterns that would otherwise be impossible to perform.”
Reich, “The Continuous Phase Shifting Pulse Gate,” E.A.T. Records, Getty Research
Institute, accession no. 94003, box 12, folder 53, page 3. See also Reich’s 9-page pro-
posal, “Phase Shifting Music Gate,” box 6, folder 29, page 2.
5. Jon Gibson, interview with the author, January 6, 2010:  “The things had
glitches and wouldn’t do exactly what Steve wanted. . . . The boxes would sort of hop
somewhere else that they weren’t supposed to . . . [it] was glitchy stuff.”
6. Glass, interview with Dean Suzuki, April 9, 1982; in Suzuki 1991, 480.
7. Reich, Four Log Drums (May 27, 1969)  [CD 40, Track  4], Steve Reich
Collection, PSS. One explanation for the additional confusion can be found in
Reich’s program notes for the Whitney concert. Reich explains that when the log
drummers arrived at a steady eighth-note pulse (such as in measures 5 and 7), they
were instructed to maintain that pattern while “one, two, or three [performers]
at a time, drop out and rest, creating sub-patterns by their absence.” From the re-
cording, it sounds as though the performers began this “dropping-out” process be-
fore arriving at measure 5. See Reich 1969e.
8. Reich, Pulse Music (May 27, 1969)  [CD 23, Tracks 1–2], Steve Reich
Collection, PSS.
9. Strickland 1993, 209.
10. Reich 1974, 27. Reich returned to electronic music with Mein Name Ist (1981),
written for Clytus Gottwald. On Reich’s history with Gottwald, see Pymm 2015.
11. Reich, Sketchbook [1], June 28, 1969, p. [46L], Steve Reich Collection, PSS.
12. Reich, Sketchbook [1], August 12, 1969, p. [71R], Steve Reich Collection, PSS.
13. Henahan 1970, 15.
340 Beyond the West

14. Snyder 1970. For more on Four Organs, see Sumanth Gopinath’s chapter in
this volume.
15. Reich printed this essay both in full and in excerpts in programs. See, for
example, Boston Symphony Orchestra Concert (September 8, 1971); New  York
University Concert (November 11, 1971), Barnes Hall Concert (October 12, 1972).
See also Reich 1971, 1972a, 1972b.
16. Reich 1969a, 56.
17. A typed excerpt from this interview by Reich, labeled “Part of a discussion
between Steve Reich and the British musician and critic Michael Nyman recorded
in London in June of 1970 and published in slightly different form in The Musical
Times of March 1971,” is now kept at the Paul Sacher Stiftung. The published version
of the interview was edited and condensed by Nyman; see Nyman 1971, 229–31.
18. There are two entries in Reich’s daily planner regarding this filming: Thursday,
April 1, 1971: “Drumming Rehearsal for German T.V. to see 9 pm”; Thursday, April
9, 1971: “Drumming Rehearsal for German TV – 7:30.” Reich Agenden 1971, Steve
Reich Collection, PSS.
19. Helms 1972. A copy of this film is held at the ZKM|Center for Art and Media
Karlsruhe, Videocollection/Laboratory for Antique Video Systems. Excerpts of this
film have been reassembled and rereleased under a new title, New Music: Sounds and
Voices from the Avant-Garde. This 2010 release has removed the lengthy and exten-
sive German commentary by Helms that runs throughout the 1972 documentary.
20. Reich, Sketchbook [4], p. [33], June 22, 1971, Steve Reich Collection, PSS.
21. Reich, Sketchbook [4], p. [33–34], June 24, 1971, Steve Reich Collection, PSS.
22. Henahan 1971.
23. Ibid.
24. “Die Musik muss aus ökonomischen Gründen von wenigen Musikern,
am besten von den Komponisten selbst und mit mitgebrachten Instrumenten
oder Geräten aufführbar sein, da die Konzerte fast ohne Ausnahme in Museen,
Universitätsräumen oder Kirchen, nicht aber in Konzertsälen stattfinden. Die
Instrumente sollten elektronisch oder elektrisch verstärkt sein, um grössere Räume
zu füllen und den Strassen- oder U-Bahnlärm zu übertönen. Die Stücke sollten
zudem wenig musikalische Entwicklung aufweisen, um mit der herrschenden
faschistoiden Ideologie der ahistorischen Beliebigkeit und Invarianz in Einklang zu
stehen” (Helms 1972, 40:14–40:51).
25. “Ausschnitte aus privaten Avantgarde-Zirkeln und Gespräche mit
Komponisten liefern Helms manchmal plausible, meist aber krampfhaft gedeutete
Indizien für den Notstand der amerikanischen Neutöner” (Der Spiegel 1972, 161).
26. Beal 2006, 197–201. Beal notes, for example, that critic Hans-Klaus
Jungheinreich described Reich’s performers as resembling “high performance
machines.”
27. Wasserman 1972, 46. Reich echoed this sentiment in an unpublished essay,
writing, “When performing I  don’t want to be free to do whatever momentarily
comes to mind, I  want to be free of all that momentarily comes to mind.” Reich,
“Machine Fantasies into Human Events” 341

“Personal Observations towards a Yoga of Performing Music” (Textmanuskripte,

Steve Reich Collection, PSS).
28. Roos 1974, 78.
29. “Rhythmische Muster (‘Patterns’) werden ausgestanzt, eingehämmert,
beliebig reproduziert, wobei sich ganz von selbst die Vorstellung von Fabrik und
Fließband ergibt” (Gutscher 1974).
30. “Die Monotonie des hier sich abspielenden Arbeitsprozesses erinnert
nicht von ungefähr an das Fließband:  immergleiche Handgriffe produzieren
Immergleiches. Sicherlich partizipiert Steve Reichs Musik darin an der Übermacht
der heute produzierten Industriemusik, wie diese reflektiert sie die Neurosen des
Maschinenzeitalters” (Gottwald 1975, 4).
31. Reich 1975, 200; Reich sent a copy of his original article (written in English)
to Gottwald, along with a cover letter to Melos/Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Reich’s
article was dated March 4, 1975; this English version is held in the Clytus Gottwald
Sammlung, IIIb 1973–79, PSS.
32. Goodyear 2002; 2008, 169–73; Turner 2006.
33. Roszak 1969, 5.
34. Touraine 1971.
35. Marcuse 1964.
36. Ellul 1964, xxv (emphasis in original).
37. Mumford 1970, 66.
38. Turner 2006, 36–38.
39. Davis 1998, 145.
40. Reich, “Part of a discussion between Steve Reich and the British musician
and critic Michael Nyman recorded in London in June of 1970 and published in
slightly different form in the Musical Times of March 1971” (Textmanuskripte, Steve
Reich Collection, PSS).
41. Henahan 1971.
42. Wasserman 1972, 46.
43. “I would also suggest that it is somewhat because of the inhuman thoughts
about relinquishing control in music that John Cage has unfortunately made pop-
ular for a few years, that in this curious time pocket we are living in at the moment,
certain people think of control in music as somehow mechanical—instead of med-
itative and ecstatic” (Reich 1975, 199–200). For Reich’s English version, see Clytus
Gottwald Sammlung, IIIb 1973–1979, PSS.
44. See Cole 2010, 88; Fink 2005b, 72; Chapman 2013b, Gopinath has given the
most attention to Reich’s yoga practice; see Gopinath 2005, 60–61, 150–51.
45. Syman 2010, 7. On the problem of defining yoga, see Alter 2004.
46. Typed on a three-by-five notecard to be sent to Who’s Who in America in
December 1974, Reich wrote:  “I have a strong need for a personal self-discipline
with ancient universal roots. Since 1966 I  have regularly practiced Hatha Yoga
and Pranayama (breathing exercises)” (Steve Reich Textmanuskripte, Steve Reich
Collection, PSS). Fellow composer Philip Glass has divulged much more about his
342 Beyond the West

yoga practice; see Glass 2015, 191–200. See also Glass’s interview with Tworkov and
Coe, republished in Glass 1997, 316–29.
47. Sender recalls learning yoga from Reich in Manhattan in September 1966
(see Cole 2012). On her résumé, dancer Laura Dean also credits her yoga education
to Steve Reich. She went on to teach yoga beginning in 1971. See Dean 1973.
48. The eight limbs of yoga are found in the Yoga Sūtras (2.29): “1. Yama (uni-
versal moral commandments); 2. Niyama (self-purification by discipline); 3. Āsana
(posture); 4. Prāṇayama (rhythmic control of the breath); 5. Pratyāhāra (withdrawal
and emancipation of the mind from the domination of the senses and exterior
objects); 6. Dhāraṇa (concentration); 7. Dhyāna (meditation) and 8. Samādhi (a state
of super-consciousness brought about by profound meditation).” See Iyengar 1994.
49. Hartenberger 2016, 49.
50. De Michelis 2004, 181–207.
51. Daniélou 1991 (1949), 31.
52. Reich 1971, 30 (emphasis in the original). This excerpt does not appear in
the Anti-Illusion printing of “Music as a Gradual Process.” The essay underwent nu-
merous revisions.
53. Ibid.
54. Eliade (1958) 2009, 33–34.
55. Ibid., 3.
56. “Unlike New Leftist political liberation, in which personal liberation meant a
fuller realization of one’s human potential, this latter meaning of liberation appears
to be anti-humanist, in that it suppresses the earthly individual in favor of some kind
of higher abstract liberation, whether spiritual or communal or both” (Gopinath
2005, 64).
57. See Eliade (1958) 2009, 227–36.
58. Kripal 2008, 16–24.
59. Swami Krishnananda’s lectures on the Yoga Sūtras were delivered from
March to August 1976. A transcript and audio recording of this lecture are available
online through the Divine Life Society. The transcribed lectures are also compiled in
book form. See Krishnananda 2007, 569–70.
60. Mumford 1934, 15.
61. Ibid., 17.
62. Ibid.
63. Reich 1975, 200.
64. Rockwell 1975.
65. Reich 1976.
66. Reich’s directions in the scores for Music for 18 Musicians are as follows: “in
one breath; breathe when comfortable; fade in/out through repeats.”
67. Mailer (1957) 1959, 338. On the postwar critique of abstraction, see P. Ford
2013, 151–77.
68. Mumford 1934, 14.
69. Sivananda (1935) 2000, 29.
“Machine Fantasies into Human Events” 343

70. See Yesudian and Haich (1953) 1972, 10, 44, 176. When asked how he learned
yoga, Reich recalled learning pranayama from Ramón Sender in San Francisco.
However, Ramón Sender reports learning pranayama from Reich in Manhattan. See
Cole 2012. Reich also recalled, with some uncertainty, using the book Yoga & Health
to learn yoga. Reich, interview with author (September 9, 2016).
71. T. Johnson 1976, 121.
72. Ibid.
73. Rushkoff 2013, 112–13.
74. This accords with what historian of religion Catherine Albanese (2006) has
called the “combinative practices” of American metaphysical traditions—the ten-
dency to commingle various religious discourses and practices. On religious bri-
colage, see Altglas 2014. The countercultural classic for such bricolage of spiritual
techniques was Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, which reads: “This manual contains a wide
variety of techniques. Everyone’s needs are different and everyone is at a different
stage along the path. But as with any recipe book, you choose what suits you.” Ram
Dass 1971, n.p.
75. Reich 1987a.
76. Poncé 1973, 155.
77. Reich, Sketchbook [5], August 14, 1971, p. [14], Steve Reich Collection, PSS.
78. This technique is described in Iyengar 1994, 454.
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Index

Page numbers followed by f and t indicate figures and tables, respectively. Unless
otherwise indicated, works listed are by Steve Reich.

“Abegg” Variations, op. 1 drumming, 53, 260, 278, 283–85,

(Schumann), 36–37 293–95, 298–99, 306
“Abraham & Nimrod” (Reich), in Electric Counterpoint, 259–99
97–98, 98t of Ewe, 277–78, 305–6, 307
Abulafia, Abraham, 338 gankogui bell patterns, 278,
accent markings (ta’amim), 114, 119 287–89, 288f, 293–98
accents, New York, 167 Ghanaian, 264–65
acoustic music, 329–30 Gogo songs, 282–83
Adams, John, 105–6, 159, 171, 192 harmonics, 265–66
Adangme people, 282–83 Icibitiku drums, 262–63
Adorno, Theodor, 10, 58, 303–4, 317 Icila dance, 262–63, 265–66, 278,
aesthetics, 17–106 283–86, 289–91, 298–99
asystematic, 289–91 Ikulu drumming, 278, 283–85
compositional, 264–65, 297 inherent patterns and rhythms,
reconciliatory, 93–106 262–63, 264–65, 287–88
testimonial, 76 Kagan drum, 278
Africa, occidental, 259–67 Kalimba, 281
African American and African Katanga guitar, 281
American–derived vernacular Kigandan Amadinda, 263–64
music, 36–37 likembe, 262–63
“African horn polyphonie” (1987), Lugandan, 263–64
250, 250t makwa handclapping
African music, 9–10, 70, 305 patterns, 283–89, 286–88f,
Ageshi drumming, 293–95 293–97, 298–99
Akache drumming, 278, 283–85 Matepe, 278, 298–99
Amadinda, 264–65 Mbira dza Vadzimu, 278,
Banda Linda music, 270, 271, 281, 289–91
274–76f, 280f, 295–97, 298–99 melodic techniques, 280–81, 282

369
370 Index

African music (cont.) anti-colonialism, 98

The Music of Africa (Nketia), 282 Anti-Illusion catalog, 229
Ngwayi drumming, 298–99 anti-Semitism, 98
phasing, 261, 262, 277–78, 294–99 ap Siôn, Pwyll, 8–9, 10
“Postscript to a Brief Study of Apple IIC, 247
Balinese and African Music” Arab-Israeli conflict, 93, 97–99
(Reich), 305, 307 The Cave as resolution of, 102–6
“Sound of Africa” series Arom, Simha, 270–72, 288–89
(Tracey), 281–82 ndereje balendoro model,
staggered canons, 277 271–73, 272f
Studies in African Music (Jones), Aronson, Marc, 160
260, 261, 262–63, 264, 265–66, art, 19, 93
277–78, 304–5 art music, 21–22
traditional, 37–38, 277, 297 Artforum, 329
typological features, 262–63 Āsana (postural yoga), 332
Ugandan, 262–63, 264 “Ashes to Ashes” (Bowie), 297–98
Xhosa Umrhube mouthbow, 281 Ashkenazic traditions, 64–66
Xizambi friction bow, 281 Association for the Advancement of
xylophone, 262–63, 264, 270, 283 Creative Musicians, 218
African Music: Journal of the African asymmetric patterns, 287–89
Music Society, 264, 278 asystematic aesthetics, 289–91
African Music from the Source of the asystematic systematics, 289–91
Nile (Kubik), 263–64 audio data, 186–87
Africanism, 140 augmentation technique, 31, 32
afterlife (World to Come), Austin, William, 59, 245, 264
167–71, 173 auteurism, documentary-cinematic,
aga, 271 10. See also Reich, Steve, as
Ageshi drumming, 293–95 director, 164–71
Akache drumming, 278, 283–85 authenticity, 160
Akhnaten (Glass), 56 authority, 113–32
Alit, Dewa Ketut, 311f autobiographical approach, 172
Alorworye, Gideon, 260 avant-garde, 218–19
Amadinda music, 263–65, 298–99 neo-avant-garde, 55–56
American Minimal Music Reich’s critique of, 230
(Mertens), 55–56 Wasserpfeifen in New York:
American Society for Eastern Arts, Musikalische Avantgarde
305, 312–14 zwischen Ideologie und
Americanism, real, 167 Elektronik (Water Pipes/Bongs
analytical concerns, 17–106 in New York: Musical Avant-
ancientness, 11–12 Garde Between Ideology and
Anderson, Virginia, 21–22 Electronics) (documentary), 326,
anthropic units, 336–37 327f, 328–29
Index 371

Bach, Johann Sebastian Beethoven, Ludwig van, rst Resulting

Balinese responses to, 317 Patter 171, 279–80
Reich’s view of, 171, 245 Behrman, David, 328–29
The Well-Tempered Clavier, Beirens, Maarten, 8–9, 10, 56
167–71, 169f Beiser, Maya, 168
Bachauer, Walter, 55, 56–57 Belkin, Alan, 248–49
Baker, Mrs., 146t, 151 Bell Labs, 32
Baker, Wallace, 144, 146t, 149–51, 153 Bellevue Hospital, Lower
Bakker, Twila, 9, 10 Manhattan, 149
Baldwin, James, 154 Bemba people, 261, 298–99
Bali: Gamelan Semar Pegulingan/ Benjamin, Walter, 8
Gamelan of the Love God Berio, Luciano, 3, 29, 241
(Nonesuch), 312–16, 313f, 318t Berlin Festival, 55
Balinese High School of the Berliner, Paul, 285, 286f
Performing Arts, 316–17 Bernard, Jonathan W., 192
Balinese music, 9–10, 53, 70, Bernstein, Leonard, 223–24
305–6, 307 Biareishyk, Siarhei, 153
gambuh, 309 Bira ceremony, 286
gamelan, 53, 265–66, 315f, Blacking, John, 281–82
316–17, 318t Bloom, Harold, 69–70
gender wayang, 309 Bonham, John, 27
improvisation, 308 Bosco, Mwenda Jean, 281
lelambatan, 309 Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), 7
mallet playing, 307 January 18, 1973 performance of
Music in Bali (McPhee), 304–5, 311 Four Organs, 8–9, 19–21, 34–35
partner drumming, 306 Spectrum concerts, 19–20
“Postscript to a Brief Study of Boulez, Pierre, 3, 159
Balinese and African Music” Bowie, David, 297–98
(Reich), 305, 307 Brahms, Johannes, 171, 279–80, 317
BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), breath and breathing, 337–38
100, 240t, 245–46 breath control, 335, 337, 338
Banda Linda music breathing exercises, 332, 338–39
Electric Counterpoint quotation, Music for 18 Musicians, 335,
274–76f, 280f, 295–97 336f, 337–38
Ippy horns, 271, 298–99 Pranayama, 332, 338–39
xylophone scale, 270 Brecht, Bertolt, 93
barococo, 11–12 Britten, Benjamin, 307
Baroque tradition, 245–46 Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM),
Barthes, Roland, 162–63 100, 240t, 245–46
Bartók, Béla, 53, 69, 170–71, 245 Brooklyn Philharmonic, 240t
bass, 79 Brown, Earle, 328–29
The Beatles, 29 Brown, James, 27
372 Index

Brown, John (Nelson), 141 chants, 120, 123–24

Brown, Oscar, 144 development of, 94–95,
Bryars, Gavin, 54–55 96t, 97–102
BSO. See Boston Symphony digital documents, 188
Orchestra documentary approach, 161
Buddhism, 333 familial keys, 103–4, 104f
framing questions, 120–22
Cage, John, 19–20, 34, harmonic structure, 78– 79,
218–19, 328–29 81– 89, 83t, 84–85f, 90,
Notations, 223–24, 225, 230–31 103– 4, 104f
cak rhythms, 310–12, 311f language layers 1 and 2, 120–23
Calkins, Judge, 152 language layers 3 and 4, 123–24
call and response, 271–72 linguistic material, 120
Cameron, Catherine, 243 orthography, rhythm, and voice in
candetan cymbal patterns, 311 text, 124–27
Candid Records, 144 political evolution of, 96t, 97–102
canon, 243–45 reconciliatory aesthetic, 93–106
staggered canons, 277 “Reconciling the Family of Man,”
Western art music, 251–52 100, 102–6
cantillation. See chanting or cantillation sampled answers, 120–23
Carnegie Hall: January 18, 1973 score, 125f, 126–27, 130–31
performance of Four Organs, scriptural episodes, 120, 123–24
8–9, 19–21, 34–35 selection of words and voices for,
Carter, Elliott, 19–20 81, 82
Casey, Celia, 9, 10 speech, music, and repetition
Casio diskettes, 184 in, 115–17
Casio FZ-1 digital sampling speech melodies, 83–84, 84f
keyboard, 96t staging, 120, 124, 129–25f
Catapano, Peter, 247 subject, 93
Caux, Daniel, 56–57 thematic tie with Different
cave, Plato’s, 117–20 Trains, 99–100
The Cave (1993), 8–9, 75–90, 115, 161 “Video Handwriting,”
act 1, first Hagar scene, 83–84, 84f 121–22, 124–26
act 1, “Isaac” scene, 84, 85f, 85 work tapes, 182
act 1, scene 1, mm. 10–30, 113 Cave of the Patriarchs (Cave of
act 1, scene 1, “Opening Typing Machpelah), Hebron, 93–94,
Music,” 125f, 124, 127 116, 123
act 1, scene 7, 128, 129f Cello Counterpoint (2003), 241, 266
act 2, 117 Central African Republic, 270–71
act 3, 104–5, 117 Banda Linda music, 270–71,
as Arab-Israeli conflict 274–76f, 280f, 295–97, 298–99
resolution, 102–6 Centre Culturel, Paris, 54
Index 373

Chambers, Steve, 54 Coltrane, John, 97–98, 218, 262

“Chandetan” (never realized), 304–5 Come Out (1966), 2, 29, 35–36, 225
chanting or cantillation archival recording, 145, 146t
in The Cave, 123–24 inherent patterns, 264–65
Hebrew biblical cantillation or narrative strands, 148
chant, 37–38, 61, 62–63, 64–66, phase relations, 278
70, 114, 119, 123 prehistory, 139–54
medieval chant and organum, premiere, 139, 143–44
28–29, 36–37, 265–66 as response to violence, 162–63
“Ramayana Monkey Chant” royalty payments, 10, 154
(Golden Rain, Nonesuch speech extracts, 10, 145–48
Explorer), 310, 318t temporal distortions, 163
Charter Group for a Pledge of commissions, 55–56, 59, 239–40,
Conscience, 142, 143 240t, 241, 246, 247
Chopin, Frédéric, 19–20 compositional aesthetics, 264–65, 297
chord progressions, 28–29, 79, 192–94 compositional practice, 29, 172,
Music for 18 Musicians, 194–99, 249–50, 251–52, 259, 261–62,
196–209f, 200–10, 211, 335 264, 278–79, 281, 294–95, 326
oscillating chords, 205–10, autobiographical approach, 172
207–9f, 211 working methods, 247–48,
Christianity, 103 249, 251
City Life (1995), 161 compositional tools, 247–52.
autobiographical elements, 172 See also specific tools
documentary approach, 161 computer software, 247–50, 251–52.
“It Has been a Honeymoon—Can’t See also specific tools
Take No Mo’,” 172 computers, 247–52
source recordings, 162–63, 167 Concerto (World to Come)
the CIVIL warS (Wilson), 56 (Lang), 167–71
clapping. See handclapping control, 328, 329, 331, 332–33, 337
Clapping Music (1972), 3, 21–22, 227, of breath, 335, 337, 338
283–85, 329 inner, 332
gankogui/makwa pattern, 295–97 techniques of, 338–39
phase relations, 261–62, Cook, Nicholas, 5
283–85, 284f Corigliano, John, 159
rhythmic patterns, 260, 283–85, Cornell University, 245, 264, 278
287, 294–95 Cosgrove, Kevin, 164
sampling from, 297–98 Cotter, Jim, 22–23
sketches for, 287, 294–95, 296f counterpoint, 245
Clinton, George, 32 Counterpoint series (1980s), 9, 239–52
clocks, 334, 337 Cello Counterpoint (2003), 241, 266
Cohn, Richard, 4, 26 critical reception, 240–41,
Coldcut, 6–7 242, 245–46
374 Index

Counterpoint series (1980s) (cont.) Debussy, Claude, 53, 245

e-sketches, 248, 249, 250–52, 250t DeLuca, Edward, 148–49
Electric Counterpoint (1987), 9–10, Democratic National Convention
78–79, 240t, 241, 245–46, 247, (1988), 98
251, 259–99 depersonalization, 307
history, 239–46 Der Spiegel, 329
New York Counterpoint (1985), Derrida, Jacques, 118–21, 122,
240t, 241, 242, 244, 245 128–29, 131–32
performance tapes, 181–82 The Desert Music (1983), 6, 56, 78–79,
premieres, 245–46 97, 240t, 247
Vermont Counterpoint (1982), 240t, dhimmi, 100
241–42, 243–44, 245–46, 249–50 diatonicism, 24–25, 79, 191, 210
Courage, Alexander, 30–31, Diddley, Bo, 22–23, 26
31f, 36–37 Different Trains (1988), 2, 8–9,
Cousins, Elaine, 248–49 75–90, 93–94
Cowan, Rob, 4 African influences, 266
Cowell, Henry, 223–24 analog-to-digital
Craig, Mrs., 146t, 152 conversions, 183
Crawford, James “Sugar Boy,” 26 analytic studies, 183
Cunningham, Michael, 1–2, audio expansions, 183
5–6, 7, 11 autobiographical elements, 172
cymbal patterns, 311 commissioning, 240t
Czerny, Carl, 19–20 composition, 251
critical reception, 239–41
da Silva, Howard, 142 digital data, 184–87, 185–86f
Dachau 1974 (Korot), 95 documentary approach, 160–61
Daniel Variations (2006), 2 harmonies, 78–79, 81–89,
Daniélou, Alain, 332 86–88f, 90
data, digital movement 1, 88f, 88
analog-to-digital conversions, 183 narrative progression, 105
deterioration of, 183–84, 186–87 performance tapes, 181–82
hybrid-digital (paper, data, back as response to Holocaust, 106, 159
again) media approach, 182–87 selection of words and
Davies, Peter Maxwell, 19–20 voices, 79–82
Davis, Erik, 331 sketches for, 183
Davis, Lawrence, 77, 79–80, 165 source material, 165, 182
Davis, Miles, 24f, 24–25 thematic tie with The Cave, 99–100
Davis, Ossie, 143, 154 digital data, 184–87, 185–86f
de Leeuw, Reinbert, 59 analog-to-digital conversions, 183
Dean, Laura, 55, 332 deterioration of, 183–84, 186–87
The Death of Klinghoffer (Adams), hybrid-digital (paper, data, back
105–6, 159 again) media approach, 182–87
Index 375

Digital Performer (software), 185–86 Eames, Charles and Ray, 32

digital repetition, 128–32. Ebright, Ryan, 8–9, 10
See also repetition ECM records, 239–40
dissonance, grouping, 287–88 ecstasy, 331
The Dixie Cups, 26 trance rituals, 311
DJ Spooky, 6–7 Eight Lines (1979), 8–9, 53–70, 170–71
docu-music, 9. See also WTC 9/11 analysis, 59–69, 60–68f
documentary-cinematic auteurism, combined piano 1 and 2 parts and
10. See also Reich, Steve, as flute melody, 63f, 63–64, 65f
director, 164–71 commissioning, 240t
documentary music video theater, comparison with Piano Phase,
75, 93 59–60, 60f
Dodson, Dan, 142 consolidatory features, 60–61
dominant-seventh chords, 24–25 extended melodies, 53, 61–64, 62f,
dominant-ninth chords, 24–25 65f, 67
dominant-eleventh chords, 31 extended melody in flute, 64, 65f, 67
The Doors, 36–37 flute melody and mode, 68f, 68
Dorfman, Mrs. Ralph I., 240t flute melody and piano 1 part,
Dorian mode, 197–98 61–63, 62f
double phasing, 291–92, 292f harmonics, 78
Double Sextet (2007), 181 innovative features, 60–61
drugs, psychedelic, 34 nine-note set, 68f, 68–69
drumming “open fifth” fingerprint, 67
African, 53, 260, 262–63, 278, opening lines, 59–60, 60f
283–85, 293–95, 298–99, 306 opening section, 64, 65f, 67
partner, 306 premiere, 59
Drumming (1971), 21–22, 60–61, 69, scalar combinations, 67f, 67, 68
78, 206, 326 section 1, 68f, 68
Balinese responses to, 317 tonal regions, 66f, 66–67
critical reception, 240–41, 330 18 Musicians. See Music for 18
inherent or rhythmic patterns, Musicians (1976)
260, 264–65 Einstein on the Beach (Glass),
meter, 244 95, 211–12
performances in Europe during the Elective Affinities (Goethe), 8
1970s, 54–55, 56–57 Electric Counterpoint (1987), 9–10,
phasing, 306–7 241, 245–46, 247
positioning of marimba African components, 259–99,
players, 264–65 267–92f
Reich on, 327–28 asynchronous modalities, 287–88,
tonality, 317 289–91, 290f
Duet (1993), 11–12 Banda Linda music, 274–76f,
Dylan, Bob, 20–21 280f, 295–97
376 Index

Electric Counterpoint (1987) (cont.) “An End to Electronics”

commissioning, 240t (1968–70), 247
compositional tools, 251 Engels, Friedrich, 35–36
critical reception, 242, 246 Ennanga music, 278
double phasing, 291–92, 292f Epstein, Paul, 3–4
e-sketches, 248, 249, 250–52, 250t Epton, Bill, 152
gankogui/makwa pattern, ethics, 76
293–94, 295–97 Europe, 54–59
handclapping patterns, 285–86, Evans, Bill, 218, 224–25
287–88f, 287–88 An Evening of Music by Steve Reich
harmonics, 78–79, 269, 270f (January 5, 1967), 226, 228–29
horn figures and patterns, 272–77, program, 221–22, 223t
273–80f, 278–80 Event III (February 1964 performance
introduction, 269, 270f for civil rights activists), 142
makwa/gankogui pattern, “Events/Comments: Is New Music
293–94, 295–97 Being Used for Political or Social
metrics, 287–89, 288–89f Ends?” (Reich), 94–95
phase relations, 283–85, 292–93 Everist, Mark, 5
phasing, 289–93, 290f Ewe music, 277–78, 305–6, 307
premiere, 245–46 Exodus, 113, 168, 173
releases, 298 experimentalism, 218–19, 230
rhythmic and resulting patterns, Explorer series (Nonesuch), 310,
267–70f, 267–69, 283–85, 312–14, 313f
287–91, 288–89f, 292–94 extended melodies, 53, 61, 62f,
score, 287 65f, 67
sketches, 248, 249–52, 250t,
283–85, 284f, 287 Fairleigh-Dickinson University art
staggered canons, 277 gallery, Madison, New Jersey:
versions and sampling from, 298 An Evening of Music by Steve
electronic music, 328–29 Reich (January 5, 1967), 221–22,
electronics 223t, 226, 228–29
computers, 247–51 Farfisa Mini Compact combo organs,
“An End to Electronics” 23, 29, 31, 32, 36–37
(1968–70), 247 Farrakhan, Louis, 97–98
multitrack tape, 242, 247 Farrell, Colin, 5–6
Reich’s opposition to, 326–28 fascism, 57–58, 329
Eliade, Mircea, 331, 333 Fendrich, Laurie, 159
Ellul, Jacques, 331 Feynman, Richard, 34
Emancipation Proclamation film: Reich’s interests in, 162–63
(Lincoln), 144 film scores, 5–6
embodiment, perspectival, 19–38 Fink, Robert, 4–5, 9, 10, 21–22,
Emerick, Geoff, 29 64–66, 78
Index 377

First Intifada, 97 3-2 clave and tresillo patterns,

“First Resulting Patterns” in Electric 26f, 26, 31
Counterpoint (1987), 249 tonality, 79
Fisher, Matthew, 36–37 Four Pieces (1963), 218
flight-as-escape, 37–38 The Four Sections (1987), 240t
Ford, Andrew, 168 France: government of, 240t
Foster, Stephen, 226–27 Frazier, Frederick, 144
Foundation for Contemporary “The Freedom Now Suite” (Roach
Performance Arts, 223–24 and Brown), 144
Four Log Drums (1969), 323–25, 324f Freeman, Betty, 95, 163, 240t
Four Organs (1970), 7, 169–70 Fried, Michael, 259–60
arrangement of performers, 32 Friendship Baptist Community
Carnegie Hall performance Center, Thirtieth Street (NYC),
(January 18, 1973), 8–9, 144, 145
19–21, 34–35 Fromm Music Foundation, 240t
chord comparisons, 24f, 24–25
chord transformations, 28–29, 78, 79 gambuh, 309
critical reception, 19–22, 325 gamelan gambang, 305
dominant eleventh chord, 78 gamelan music, 53, 265–66, 303–17
European performances analytical comparisons, 309–16
(1970s), 54 pattern contours, 315f
hermeneutics, 19–38, 25–31f Reich’s collection of recordings,
interpretation, 31–38 310, 318t
melodic theme, 30f, 30–31, 32 gankogui bell patterns, 278, 287–89,
moment 1: measure 0, 288f, 294–98
0:00–0:02, 22–23 Gann, Kyle, 3–4, 242, 246
moment 2: measure 0, 0:02–0:05, Geismar, Maxwell, 142
23–27, 24–26f gender wayang, 309
moment 3: measure 11, 1:34, General Motors, 154
27f, 27–28 Genesis, 103, 123, 124
moment 4: measure 23, 3:38, 28–29 geographic contexts, 10
moment 4: measure 26, 4:11, 28–29 Germany, 58, 329–30
moment 5: measure 37, 7:37, Getman, Jessica, 30–31
30f, 30–31 Getz, Stan, 218
pitch comparison, 31f Ghanaian music, 264–65
radicalism, 21–22 of Adangme people, 282–83
reduction, 27f of Ewe people, 277–78, 305–6, 307
rhythmic groupings, 24–25, Reich’s drumming studies,
25f, 36–37 260, 305
scoring, 19 rhythmic patterns, 287
Shandar LP recording, 57 Sogba or Sogo dances, 287
tape-reversal effects, 29 of Wala people, 282–83
378 Index

Gibson, Jon, 54, 221–22, 223t, 226, hand-over-hand variations, 227–28

230, 323–24 handclapping, 283–94
“Ginny in the Mirror” (Shannon), 23 makwa, 283–89, 286–88f,
Glass, Philip, 22–23, 54–57, 230, 262, 293–97, 298–99
323–25, 328–29 Hardin, Louis (Moondog), 22–23
Akhnaten, 56 Harlem Defense Council, 152
Einstein on the Beach, 95, 211–12 Harlem Hospital, 149, 151
“Rome” section of the CIVIL warS Harlem Six, 139, 144–45, 148, 153–54
(Glass & Wilson), 56 Harlem Youth Unlimited, 145
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 8 Harlem’s Six Condemned, 9, 139–54.
Goffin, Cantor, 168 See also Come Out (1966)
Gogo songs, 282–83 tape transcriptions, 145, 146t
Golden Rain (Nonesuch Explorer), 310 harmonics. See also specific works
Goldstein, Baruch, 93 African, 265–66
“Gong-Gong” pattern, 287 parallel, 282–83
Goodyear, Anne Collins, 330 Reich’s approach to, 6–7, 10, 75–90,
Gopinath, Sumanth, 8–9, 10, 55–56, 192, 265–66
70, 140, 226–27, 333 return to, 192
Gordon, Michael, 159 watermelon harmony, 24f, 24–25
Gottschalk, Louis Moreau, 26 harp music, 262–63
Gottwald, Clytus, 10, 58, 330, 331 Hartenberger, Russell, 22–23, 59,
grain: of voice, 162–64 69, 332
“The Grain of the Voice” Haskins, Rob, 173
(Barthes), 162–63 Hatha Yoga, 332, 333
grammatology, musical, 128–32 Hatzalah, 160
The Greatest Moments in Sport Havens, Richie, 154
(1955), 141–42 The Hawketts, 26
Greenwood, Jonny, 298 Hayward Gallery, London, 54–55
Gregory, Dick, 143–44 Hebrew biblical cantillation or chant,
Grierson, John, 172 37–38, 61, 62–63, 64–66, 70,
Grimes, Ev, 59, 141 114, 123
grouping dissonance, 287–88 ta’amim (accent markings or
Guernica (Picasso), 93 signs), 119
Gutscher, Manfred, 329–30 “Hello Steve Reich Mix for the DFA”
(Murphy), 297–98
Hamm, Daniel (Danny), 139–40, 141, Helms, Hans G., 326, 328–29
144–45, 149–51, 152–53 Henahan, Donal, 3–4, 57, 303, 325, 328
payments to, 10, 154 Hendrix, Jimi, 29
tape transcriptions, 146t Hentoff, Nat, 142
Hamm, Mary, 146t, 151 hermeneutics, 10–11
Hancock, Herbie: “Maiden Voyage,” Hessischer Rundfunk, 240t
24f, 24–25, 27–28, 28f Hexaméron (1837), 19–20
Index 379

Hillier, Paul, 5, 76 imaginary space travel, 30–31, 31f,

Hindenburg disaster, 161 32–34, 36–37
Hinduism, 309, 333 impotence, political, 94–95
historical contexts, 10 improvisation, 217–31
Hoek, David J., 5 in Balinese music, 308
Holland, Bernard, 246, 303 Piano Phase, 226–29, 230–31, 237f
Holly, Buddy, 22–23 Reich’s attitude toward, 34–35, 218,
Hollywood film scores, 6–7 219, 229–30, 307
Holocaust: artistic responses to, Improvisations on a Watermelon
99–100, 159, 160–61 (1966), 221–22, 223t, 226–29
A Home at the End of the World first variation, 226–34f, 227, 228
(Cunningham), 1–2, 5–6, 7, 11 premiere, 221–22, 223t, 226, 228
Horkheimer, Max, 58 second variation, 227–29, 234–37f
horn music title, 226, 228
Banda Linda, 270, 271, 298–99 In C (Riley), 225
Electric Counterpoint, 272–77, indeterminacy, 218–19
273–80f, 278–80 Indian music, 307
“horn polyphonie” (1987), Indonesian music, 37–38
250, 250t inherent patterns and rhythms, 260,
Ippy horns, 271, 298–99 261, 262–63, 264–65, 287–88
ndereje balendoro, 267–80, 272–73f Institute of African Studies
“short horn polyphonie” (1987), (University of Ghana), 260
250, 250t Institute of Contemporary Arts,
“horn polyphonie” (1987), 250, 250t London, 54
hosho (rattle), 285 Institute of International Education, 260
The Hunger Games (film), 6 instrumental music, 225
Hurwitz, Robert, 239–40 instrumentation, 330
hybrid-analog (paper plus tape) intention, 36
media approach, 181–82 Intifada, 97
hybrid-digital (paper, data, back Ippy horns, 271, 298–99
again) media approach, 182–87 Isaac, Ephraim, 122, 123
Islam, 103
Icibitiku drums, 262–63 Israeli-Arab conflict, 93, 97–99
Icila dance, 262–63, 265–66, 278, artistic responses to, 161
283–86, 289–91, 298–99 The Cave as resolution of, 102–6
The Icila Dance: Old Style (Jones), It’s Gonna Rain (1965), 2, 29,
262–63, 283–85 114–15, 225
Idelsohn, Abraham, 119 autobiographical elements, 172
identity, 111–73 inherent patterns, 261, 264–65
“Iko Iko” (The Dixie Cups), 26 phase relations, 261–62, 278
Ikulu drumming, 278, 283–85 preparatory tape collage, 141–42
“I’m Only Sleeping” (The Beatles), 29 program notes, 118–19
380 Index

Jackendoff, Ray, 268 Kecak, 310

Jackson, Jesse, 97–98 Kehr, Klaus-Peter, 97
James, Tommy, 23 Kelly, Wynton: opening in Miles
Jameson, Fredric, 11–12, 35–36 Davis’s “Someday My Prince
Janáček, Leoš, 69 Will Come,” 24f, 24–25
jazz, 70 Kershaw, Baz, 105–6
Jazz Workshop, 218 “Ketjak: The Ramayana Monkey
Jeffries, Leonard, 98 Chant” (Golden Rain, Nonesuch
Jepson, Barbara, 246 Explorer), 310, 318t
Jewish music, 53, 70 key releases (on Farfisa organs),
Hebrew biblical cantillation or 31, 36–37
chant, 37–38, 61, 62–63, 64–66, Kigandan Amadinda music, 263–65
70, 114, 119, 123 Kim, Rebecca Y., 294–95
Reich’s, 113–32 King Tubby, 32
Jewish Music (Idelsohn), 119 The Kinks, 27
“Jock-A-Mo” (Crawford), 26 Kombe, L., 262–63, 265–66, 283–86
Johnson, Tom, 3–4, 194–95, Korekore people, 298–99
259–60, 337 Korot, Beryl, 2, 93, 94–95
Jones, Arthur M., 264, 277, 282–83, The Cave (see The Cave (1993))
287, 293–95, 297, 305 Dachau 1974, 95
The Icila Dance: Old Style, Text and Commentary, 95
262–63, 283–85 Kramer, Lawrence, 4, 10–11, 36
Studies in African Music, 260, Kripal, Jeffrey, 333
261, 262–63, 264, 265–66, Krishnanada, Swami, 333–34
277–78, 304–5 “Kronos Piece Notes,” 79, 80–81
Jones, Willie, 145 Kronos Quartet, 240t
Judaism, 37–38, 103, 338 Ku Klux Klan, 143–44
Hebrew biblical cantillation or Kubik, Gerhard, 262–64, 277, 278, 283
chant, 37–38, 61, 62–63, 64–66, Kyagambiddwa, Joseph, 263–64
70, 114, 119, 123
music of, 53, 70 Ladzekpo, Alfred, 260
orthography of “God,” 130 Lala people, 261, 277–78
“World to Come” Icila dance, 262–63, 265–66, 278,
(afterlife), 167–71 283–86, 289–91, 298–99
“Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (Rolling Stones), Landry, Richard (Dickie), 323
22–23, 27 Lane, Cathy, 160–61
Lang, David, 173
Kabbalah, 338 Concerto (World to Come), 167–71
Kagan drum, 278 Lansky, Paul, 297–98
Kalimba music, 281 Lathem, Thais, 328–29
Kassel, Matthias, 9, 10 Laura Dean Dancers and
Katanga guitar, 281 Musicians, 240t
Index 381

Lawrence, Jennifer, 6 “Maiden Voyage” (Hancock), 24f,

Leacock, Eleanor, 142 24–25, 27–28, 28f
LeCompte, Elizabeth, 104–5 Mailer, Norman, 336–37
Led Zeppelin, 27 Maimonides, 97–98
Leibowitz, Yeshayahu, 128–29, 130 makwa handclapping patterns, 283–89,
lelambatan, 309 286–88f, 293–97, 298–99
Léonin, 28–29 mallet playing, Balinese, 307
Lerdahl, Fred, 268 Mallet Quartet (2009), 266
Lesch, Helmut, 57–58 Mallets. See Music for Mallet
Levine (Packer), Renée, 97 Instruments, Voices, and
Lewis, George, 218–19 Organ (1973)
LeWitt, Sol, 259–60 mambo, 26
liberation, 333–34 Mangano, Nick, 103
Liganda people, 298–99 Manzarek, Ray, 36–37
“Light My Fire” (the Doors), 36–37 maracas, 22–23, 27, 31, 35–36
likembe music, 262–63 “March of the Puritans”
Limbak, Wayan, 310 (Bellini), 19–20
Lincoln, Abbey, 144 Marcuse, Herbert, 331
Lincoln, Abraham, 104–5, 144 “Mardi Gras Mambo”
Lincoln Square Synagogue, 98–99 (The Hawketts), 26
Lippel, Dan, 298 Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU), 247
Liszt, Franz, 19–20 Martin, Carol, 106
“Little Fluffy Clouds” (The Orb), 298 Martin, George, 29
Livelihood (1964), 29, 141–42 “Massa’s in de Cold Ground”
logocentrism (Derrida), 9, 127, (Foster), 226–27
128–29, 130 Matepe music, 278, 298–99
Longhair, Professor, 26 maximalism, 4
“Love Is Lost” (Bowie), 297–98 Mbira dza Vadzimu music, 278,
Lucier, Alvin, 328–29 281, 289–91
Lugandan music, 263–64 makwa handclapping
luxury, 11 patterns, 283–89, 286–88f,
Lycée de La Source, Orléans, 54 293–97, 298–99
Lynd, Staughton, 142 McClary, Susan, 4
Lynn, Conrad, 143–44, 153–54 McPhee, Colin, 304–5, 307, 311
lyre music, 262–63 meaning, musical, 10
“Meat Grinder” (NYPD Twenty-
MacCann, Richard, 172 Eighth Precinct station), 144,
Macintosh computer data, 149, 150
older, 186–87 media classification, 185–87
Macintosh Plus, 247 medieval chant and organum, 28–29,
“Magic Bus” (The Who), 22–23 36–37, 265–66
Mahler, Gustav, 31f, 171, 279–80 meditation, 331, 335, 338
382 Index

megamachines, 331, 335 MNS (music notation software),

melodic techniques 247–50, 251–52. See also
in African music, 280–81, 282 specific tools
extended melodies, 53, 61, 62f, modality, 192–94, 197–98
65f, 67 asynchronous modalities, 287–88,
parallelism, 282–83 289–91, 290f
speech melodies, 83–84, modern art, 19
84f, 117–18 modes, 192–94
Melodica (1966), 29, 230–31 modular-repetitive minimalism, 225
Melos magazine, 330 Molino, Jean, 270–71
Menuhin, Yehudi, 11–12 Monk, Thelonious, 24–25, 36–37
Mertens, Wim, 3–4, 55–56, 303–4 Moondog (Louis Hardin),
Metamusik Festival, Berlin, 55 22–23, 36–37
Metaphysics of Presence, 117–20 moral considerations, 89
Metheny, Pat, 240t, 242, 298 Morris, Mitchell, 140, 162
metric ambiguity, 287–88, 288f MOTU (Mark of the Unicorn), 247
metrical preference rules (MPRs) Moussaoui, Zacarias, 164
(Lerdahl and Jackendoff), 268 MPRs (metrical preference rules)
Meyer, Howard N., 142 (Lerdahl and Jackendoff), 268
MIDI control data, 186–87 multitrack tape, 242, 247
The Militant (newspaper), 143 Mumford, Lewis, 331, 334, 336–37
Mills College, 29, 218, 241 Mumma, Gordon, 328–29
minimalism, 3–4, 7, 11–12, 21–22, Murphy, Arthur (Art), 54, 323
24–25, 56, 57–58, 78, 297 collaboration with Reich,
European critique of, 303–4 217, 221–22, 223t, 224–25,
European demand for, 56–57 228–29, 230–31
modular-repetitive, 225 Murphy, James, 297–98
myth of, 259–60 music
repetition in, 192, 303–4 African, 9–10, 70, 259–99, 305
spiritual, 6–7 African American and African
stages of, 192 American–derived, 36–37
minor ninth chords, 24–25 art, 21–22, 251–52
A Minstrel Show (San Francisco in The Cave, 115–17
Mime Troupe), 143 docu-music, 160–61
minute sound details, 269–70 electronic, 328–29
“Mirage” (Tommy James and the as gradual process, 325
Shondells), 23 instrumental, 225
Mitchell, Virginia, 77, 79–80, 165 Jewish sacred music, 37–38, 53, 61,
Mixolydian clusters, 24–25 62–63, 64–66, 70, 114, 119, 123
Mizrahi chant, 123. See also Hebrew Occidental, 53
biblical cantillation popular culture, 5–6
mnemonic devices, 283–85 protest music, 144
Index 383

speech-based, 154 pulsing chords, treble only, 201f, 201

traditional, 37–38, 277, 297 rhythmic patterns, 260
vernacular, 36–38 section VI, 5–6, 204
Western art music, 251–52 sketches for, 10, 191–212
Western classical tradition, stacked fourths and fifths, 197–98
53–70, 79 tapes, 181–82
zither, 262–63 time elements, 335, 337–38
“Music as a Gradual Process” (1968), tonality, 191–212
7, 229–30, 242, 293, 323, 326, world premiere, 245–46
332–33, 335 “Music For A New Orchestra.” See
music critics. See also specific Music for 18 Musicians (1976)
individuals Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices,
response to Reich, 3–4, 19–22, and Organ (1973), 60–61, 199
54–59, 239–41, 245–46, 303, Balinese components, 306, 316
317, 325, 326, 328, 329–31, 337 chord transformations, 79,
Music for 18 Musicians (1976), 205–6, 304
9–10, 21–22, 53–54, 78, final system, 306
114–15, 169–70 marimba parts, 306
African influences, 266, 295–97 Music for Pieces of Wood
Balinese influences, 316 (1973), 3, 60
chord cycle, 194–99, 196–201f, cak telu rhythm patterns,
200–5, 211, 335 311–12, 312f
chord sequence, 208, 209f comparisons with Balinese
commercial release, 239 gamelan music, 310
contrast with Einstein on the Beach gankogui/makwa pattern, 295–97
(Glass), 211–12 meter, 244
critical reception, 240–41, 335 middle section, 311–12, 312f
development of, 60 phase relationships, 261–62
early manuscripts, 335, 336f rhythmic patterns, 260, 294–97,
early sketches, 200–5 311–12, 312f
in film and television, 5–6 sketches for, 294–95, 296f
gankogui/makwa pattern, 295–97 Music for Two or More Pianos or
harmonics, 10, 86–87, Piano and Tape (1964), 218, 221,
199–200, 210–11 223–25, 230–31
modality, 193 last known performance, 222,
“Opening Pulse,” 202, 203f, 204, 223t, 225
205, 335–37 Music in Bali (McPhee), 304–5, 311
oscillating chords, 205–10, music notation software (MNS),
207–9f, 211 247–50, 251–52. See also
pitch material, 193, 204, 210 specific tools
“Pulses” sequences, 2, 195, 197, The Music of Africa (Nketia), 282
199, 200, 204, 212, 335–37 music publishing industry, 252
384 Index

music terminology, 243–46, New York City World’s Fair

251–52, 262–63 (1964), 150–51
music theater, documentary, 75, 93 New York Counterpoint (1985), 240t,
Musica Elettronica Viva, 218 241–42, 244, 245
musical grammatology, 128–32 New York Philharmonic Horizons
musical meaning, 10 Festival, 245–46
Musical Quarterly (journal), 3–4 New York School, 218
musical ventriloquism, 292 New York Times, 19–20, 57, 303,
new musicology, 4 325, 328
Musik unserer Zeitfestival, “Benefit Aids Appeal of 6 Convicted
Stuttgart, 55 of Harlem Killing,” 143
Muyinda, Evaristo, 263–64 Korot and Reich’s statement (1994),
My Name Is (1967), 118–19, 93, 94–95
120–21, 127 Newport Folk Festival, 20–21
Newsweek, 55–56
Nagoya Marimbas (1994), The Next Day (Bowie), 297–98
266, 295–97 The Next Wave series, 245–46
narrative sequences, 75–90 Nexus, 240t
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, 270–71 ngbanja, 271
natural speech, 116 Ngwayi drumming, 298–99
ndereje balendoro, 267–72 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 20–21
Arom’s model, 271–73, 272f Nimrod, 97–98
different model, 272–80, 273f 9/11 attacks, 95–97, 113–14. See also
Nelson, Robert, 24–25 WTC 9/11 (2010)
Nelson, Truman, 139, 141, 143–44, Reich’s personal reflections
145–48, 152, 153 on, 172–73
neo-avant-garde, 55–56 Nketia, Kwabena, 281–83
Netherlands Wind Ensemble, 59 non-Western influences, 9–10, 53, 70
Neubauer, Simon, 56–57 Nonesuch Records, 239–40, 298,
Neuhaus, Max, 328–29 312–14, 313f
New Focus Records, 298 nonsense syllables, 283–85
“New Orchestra.” See Music for 18 NORAD, 160, 161
Musicians (1976) Northern Rhodesia. See Zambia
New Statesman, 326 “Not Fade Away” (Holly), 22–23
new tonality, 194–95 Notations (Cage), 223–24,
New York accents, 167 225, 230–31
New York City, New York, 55 “Notes on the Ensemble” (1973), 230
New York City Fire Department, Notre Dame Cathedral, 28–29
160, 161 Nsenga people, 281
New York City Police Department: Nyakusa people, 282–83
Twenty-Eighth Precinct station Nyman, Michael, 54–57, 95, 242,
(“Meat Grinder”), 144, 149, 150 259–60, 326
Index 385

objective processes, 161 parallelism, 268, 282–83

O’Brien, Kerry, 9–10 pattern contours, 315f See also
Occidental Africa, 259–67 inherent patterns and rhythms
Occidental music, 53 Patterson, Benjamin, 328–29
Octet (1979). See Eight Lines (1983) Paul Sacher Foundation. See Paul
“Ode to Joy” (Beethoven), 279–80 Sacher Stiftung (PSS), Basel
Of Grammatology (Derrida), 118–19 Paul Sacher Stiftung (PSS), Basel, 8,
“Oh! Dat Watermelon” 77, 79, 261, 264
(Schoolcraft), 226–27 digital holdings, 187
Oh Dem Watermelons (1965), paper archive and context, 180
226–27, 230–31 Steve Reich Collection,
watermelon-canon chord 179–88, 219
transposed to A major, Pendulum Music (1968), 54
24f, 24–25 Performer (software), 247, 251
Okukonera, 263–65 Perloff, Carey, 102
Okunaga, 263–64 Pérotin, 28–29, 53, 306
Okwawula, 263–64 perspectival embodiment, 19–38
Omukonezi, 263–65 Perspectives of New Music
Omunazi, 263–64 (journal), 3–4
Omwawuzi, 263–64 Petrushka (Stravinsky), 36–37
onto-theology, 131–32 Phaedrus (Plato), 120–21
The Orb, 298 The Pharoahs, 23
organum, medieval, 28–29, Phase Patterns (1970), 54, 57, 206
36–37, 265–66 phase shifting and phasing, 9–10, 154,
Orientalism, 307 229, 244–45, 261, 262
orthography, 124–27 in African music, 261, 262,
“Video Handwriting,” 277–78, 294–99
121–22, 124–26 double, 291–92, 292f
oscillating chords, 205–10, Phase Patterns (1970), 54, 57, 206
207–9f, 211 Piano Phase (1967), 3–5, 9, 54,
Otte, Hans, 55, 56–57 78, 79, 191, 192–93, 217–31,
overdetermination, 10 218t, 221–22f, 223–31t, 237f,
Owens, Larry, 323 244–45, 264–65
Oxford History of Western Music Reed Phase (1966), 221–22, 230–31
(Taruskin), 24–25 Violin Phase (1967), 61, 229–30,
241, 264–65
Page, Tim, 245–46 Phase Shifting Pulse Gate, 28–29,
Paine, Herbert, 146t, 148–49 306–7, 323–25, 336–38
Palestinian-Israeli conflict. See Arab- Phase to Face (documentary), 221
Israeli conflict Philips Exeter Academy, New
Pangwa people, 282–83 Hampshire, 220
paradiddling, 206 philosophical perspectives, 10
386 Index

Philosophy of New Music Plato’s cave, 117–20

(Adorno), 10 Polaczek, Dietmar, 57–58
Phrygian mode, 197–98 political events, 11–12, 17–106, 96t
Piano Phase (1967), 191, 219, 244–45 Polyphonies et Polyrhythmies
B minor motive, 219, 221f, 221 Instrumentales d’Afrique Centrale
comparison with Eight Lines, (Arom), 270–71
59–60, 60f Poncé, Charles, 338
contribution to Notations (Cage), popular culture, 5–6
223–24, 225 Portraits (1975), 119, 122–23
early versions, 219–20, 220t, postminimalism, 6–7, 78
228, 230–31 “Postscript to a Brief Study of
European performances Balinese and African Music”
(1970s), 54 (1974), 305, 307
evolution, 9, 217–31, 218–20t, 231t postural yoga (Āsana), 332.
harmonic structure, 78, 79, 193 See also yoga
improvisation, 226–29, Potter, Keith, 4, 9, 10, 53–54, 56–57,
230–31, 237f 59, 78, 86–87, 140, 224
inherent patterns, 264–65 Powers of Ten (Eames and
modality, 192–93 Eames), 32
opening lines, 59–60, 60f Prado, Pérez, 26
pitch classes, 78, 192–93 Prāṇāyāma, 332, 338–39
premiere (January 1967), 219–22, precursor texts and traditions, 70
221f, 223t, 228–29, 230–31 Prescott, Megan and Kathryn (Skins), 6
stacked-fourth motive, 219, presence
221f, 221 metaphysics of, 117–20
stacked-hand disposition, 221, 222f self-presence, 118–19
structure, 3–5 Pro Musica Nova festival, Bremen,
tonality, 193 55, 56–58
Ugandan xylophone music Procol Harum, 36–37
link, 264 Professional Composer (software),
Picasso, Pablo, 93 185–86, 247, 248–49, 251
Piece for Four Pianos (Feldman), 224 “Change Rhythm …” option, 250
Piekut, Benjamin, 218–19 “Merge Staves” feature, 249
Piersig, Fritz, 56–57 “Transpose Interval”
Pierson, Marcelle, 119 command, 248–49
pitch. See also specific works “Transpose Key …” option, 250
Reich’s approach to pitch and “Variations” menu, 248, 249, 250
harmonic content, 10, 75–90, Professor Longhair, 26
192, 265–66 Progressive Labor Party, 152
Pitch Charts (1964), 218 protest music, 144
The Plastic Haircut (1963), 29, 141–42 “The Proxy” (RJD2), 298
Platonism, 120–21 Psalms, 131–32
Index 387

PSS. See Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel Reich, Steve. See also specific works,
psychedelic drugs, 34 by title
psychedelic science fiction, 19–38 acoustical music, 329–30
psychedelic studio effects, 29 on Adorno’s Philosophy of New
publishing industry, 252 Music, 10
Pulsa group, 32 aesthetic approach, 36–37, 242–43
Pulse Music (1969), 28–29, 325 African drumming studies,
pulses and pulsing, 1, 35–36, 335 260, 305
maraca pulses, 22–23, 27, 31, 35–36 African influences, 259–99
Music for 18 Musicians “Opening ancientness, 11–12
Pulse,” 202, 203f, 204, 205, 335–37 approach to pitch and harmonic
Music for 18 Musicians “Pulses” content, 6–7, 10, 75–90,
sequences, 2, 195, 197, 199, 200, 192, 265–66
204, 212, 335–37 as artist, 55–56
oscillating chords, 205–10, augmentation technique, 31, 32
207–9f, 211 autobiographical approach, 172
in popular culture, 5–6 on avant-garde, 230
Pymm, John, 9, 10 on J. S. Bach, 171, 245
Balinese gamelan music studies,
Quinn, Ian, 24–25 305, 310, 316–17, 318t
Balinese influences, 309–16
radicalism, 103 on Bartók, 245
Radio Bremen, 55 canon, 243–45
Radio Frankfurt, 59 commercial success, 245–46
Radio Rewrite (2012), 6–7, 298 commissions, 55–56, 59, 239–40,
Radiohead, 6–7, 298 240t, 241, 246, 247
“Ramayana Monkey Chant” (Golden as composer, 12, 55–56, 78,
Rain LP, Nonesuch Explorer), 239–40, 326
310, 318t compositional aesthetics,
Ramble John Krohn (RJD2), 298 264–65, 297
rattle (hosho), 285 compositional practice, 29, 172,
Reagan, Ronald, 241 249–50, 251–52, 259, 261–62,
Reagan/Thatcher era, 3 264, 278–79, 281, 294–95, 326
real Americanism, 167 compositional tools, 247–52
reconciliatory aesthetics, 93–106 on control, 328, 329, 332–33
recorded voice, 10 creative development, 60
grain of voice, 162–64 critical reception, 3–4, 19–22,
Reich’s selection of, 79–81, 82 54–59, 239–41, 245–46, 303,
recording, tutti, 270–71 317, 325, 326, 328, 329–31, 337
Reed Phase (1966), 221–22, 230–31 development of, 78, 247
Refrain (Stockhausen), 224 diatonicism, 191, 210
Reich, Ezra, 162–63, 252 on Different Trains, 75
388 Index

Reich, Steve (cont.) sketch tapes, 182

digital development, 247 sketchbooks, 24–25, 27, 32,
as director, 164–71 33f, 200–5
discussions with Nelson, 141 sound collage for the Harlem
docu-music style, 9, 159–73 Six, 139–54
e-sketches, 248, 249, 250–52, 250t stacked-fourths style, 197–98, 219,
on Eight Lines, 59 221f, 221
1980s compositions, 239–52, 240t stacked-hands practice, 221, 222f
on electronics, 326–28 stop-action sound technique,
in Europe during the 1970s, 54–59 163–64, 169–70
in fiction, 1–2, 5–6 as student of the Torah, 131–32
film interests, 162–63 tape compositions, 58, 262
on Four Organs, 20–21 as taxi driver, 141–42
global success, 55 terminology, 243–46,
hostility toward, 3–4 251–52, 262–63
hybrid-analog (paper plus tape) theory of political
media approach, 181–82 impotence, 94–95
hybrid-digital (paper, data, back topics or themes, 89
again) media approach, 182–87 training, 29
impersonal approach, 161 treble-dominated approach, 199
on improvisation, 34–35, 218, 219, vernacular influences, 36–38
229–30, 307 Western classical influence, 53–70
influence of, 5–6 working methods, 247–48,
inspirations, 11–12 249, 251
Jewish heritage, 338 world music studies, 305
Jewish music, 113–32 on WTC 9/11, 163
logocentrism, 9, 127–30 yoga practice, 328, 332,
melodic techniques, 61 333–34, 338–39
metaphysics of presence, 117–20 Reich Remixed (1999), 6–7
new beginning, 251–52 Reich studies, 3–5, 8, 12
on 9/11, 159, 160, 172–73 Rembang, I Nyoman, 305
non-Western influences, 9–10, 53 remixes, 6–7, 298
notebooks (papers), 181, 249–50 repetition, 111–73, 317
phase relations, 278 in The Cave, 115–17
popularity, 56 digital, 128–32
pulsing technique, 1, 5–6 in Jewish music, 113–32
repetition technique, 131 minimalist, 192, 225, 303–4
resulting patterns, 229–30, replication, 11
262–63, 264–65 restoration, 11–12
sampling from, 297–98 resulting patterns or rhythms,
sampling techniques, 2 229–30, 262–63, 264–65.
self-assessment, 245 See also specific works
Index 389

“Resulting Patterns” in Electric Rushdie, Salman, 101–2

Counterpoint (1987), 249 Rushkoff, Douglas, 337–38
Rethinking Music (Cook and Everist), 5 “Russian Dance” (Stravinsky), 36–37
rhythm and rhythmic patterns, Rycroft, David, 281–82
124–27, 244–45, 260, 262–63.
See also specific works Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs, 23
asymmetric patterns, 287–89 sampling
cak rhythms, 310–12, 311f Radio Rewrite (2012), 6–7, 298
inherent rhythm, 260, 261, 262–63, from Reich, 297–98
264–65, 287–88 speech, 76, 79–81, 82
Kecak, 310 techniques, 2
resulting patterns, 229–30, San Francisco Mime Troupe,
262–63, 264–65 55, 105–6, 143, 152
rhythmic oddity, 288–89 San Francisco Symphony, 240t
3-2 clave rhythm, 26f, 26 San Francisco Tape Music Center, 29,
tresillo rhythms, 26f, 26–27, 31 55, 262
rhythmic augmentation, 60–61 Sandow, Gregory, 242
Rice, Mrs., 146t, 152 sanghyang trance rituals, 311
Rice, Robert, 145 Saxophone Phase. See Reed Phase (1966)
Rich, Alan, 3–4, 55–56 “Say Man” (Diddley), 22–23
Richards, Keith, 27 Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)
Riley, Terry, 225, 262 (Bowie), 297–98
Riskin, Shlomo, 98–99 Scherzinger, Martin, 9–10, 161
The Rite of Spring (Stravinsky), 20–21 Schola Cantorum, 58
rituals Schonberg, Harold C., 3–4, 19–22,
spirit possession, 264–65 34, 36
trance, 311 Schoolcraft, Luke, 226–27
RJD2 (Ramble John Krohn), 298 Schumann, Robert, 36–37
Roach, Max, 144 Schwarz, K. Robert, 3–4, 59, 142, 161,
Roberts, Dallas, 5–6 199, 242, 244–45
rock music, 36–37 Schwerner, Michael, 143–44
rock organ quartets, 21–22 Schwerner, Nathan, 143–44
Rockwell, John, 335 science fiction, psychedelic, 19–38
Rolling Stone, 338 Scott-Heron, Gil, 34–35
Rolling Stones, 22–23, 27 secondary witness, 106
“Rome” section of the CIVIL warS Sekar Jaya, 317
(Glass & Wilson), 56 self-presence, 118–19
Rose, Barbara, 259–60 Sellars, Peter, 97
Roszak, Theodore, 330 Semar Pegulingan, 305
Rothko Chapel, Houston, 240t Semitic cantillation, 61, 62–63, 114,
royalty payments, 10, 154 123. See also Hebrew biblical
rumba, 22–23 cantillation or chant
390 Index

Sender, Ramon, 332 Solie, Ruth, 4

sensory deprivation tanks, 34 “Someday My Prince Will Come”
Serra, Richard, 259–60 (Davis), 24f, 24–25
Sextet (1985), 6, 78–79, 240t, Sontag, Susan, 259–60
244, 295–97 Soul of Mbira (Berliner), 285
Shandar LP recording, 57 “Sound of Africa” series
Shannon, Del, 23 (Tracey), 281–82
Sheraton-Palace Hotel, San The Sound of Two Hands
Francisco, 142 (Lansky), 297–98
Shmira, 167–68 Source magazine, 94–95
Shona people: Mbira dza Vadzimu South German Radio, Stuttgart, 240t
music, 278, 281, 289–91 Southern Rhodesia. See Zimbabwe
Shondells, 23 space travel, imaginary, 30–31, 31f,
“short horn polyphonie” in Electric 32–34, 36–37
Counterpoint (1987), 250, 250t “Speak No Evil” (Shorter), 27–28
Shorter, Wayne, 27–28 The Spectator, 326
Sibelius (software), 247–48 speech
Silver Apples, 32 and identity, 111–73
“Sinom Ladrang” (Bali: Gamelan music based on, 154
Semar Pegulingan/Gamelan of natural, 116
the Love God LP, Nonesuch), New York accents, 167
312–16, 313–15f, 318t writing-as-speech, 127, 129–30
Sinti, I Wayan, 305 speech melodies, 83–84, 84f, 117–18
Six Day War, 98–99 speech samples, 75–76
Six Marimbas. See Six Pianos (1973) The Cave, 115–17
Six Pianos (1973), 60–61, 78, 240t, City Life recordings, 162–63
261–62, 304 Different Trains source
sketch studies, 177–252 material, 165
sketch tapes, 182 in Jewish music, 113–32
sketchbooks, 24–25, 27, 32, Reich’s selection of, 79–81, 82
33f, 200–5 WTC 9/11 source material, 162–63,
doodles (1969), 33f 164–65, 165f
notebooks (papers), 181, 249–50 Spies, Walter, 310
Skins (BBC), 5–6 spirit possession rituals, 264–65
Slow Motion Sound (1967), spiritual minimalism, 6–7
28–29, 169–70 St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, 240t
SNCC (Student Nonviolent stacked fourths, 197–98, 219,
Coordinating Committee), 98 221f, 221
Snow, Michael, 259–60 stacked fifths, 170–71, 197–98
Socrates, 120–21 stacked hands, 221, 222f
Sogba or Sogo dances, 287 Stafford, Frank, 144, 146t, 149, 151
Index 391

Star Trek (NBC): title cue music, ta’amim (accent markings), 114, 119
30–31, 31f, 36–37 Tage der Neuen Musik festival,
Stark, Judith, 163 Hannover, 55
Stella, Frank, 69, 259–60 tantric traditions, 333
Steve Reich Collection, 9, 77, Tanzania, 282–83
179–88, 219 tape compositions, 181–82. See also
digital section, 184 specific works
hybrid-analog (paper plus tape) African influence in, 278
media, 181–82 hybrid-analog (paper plus tape)
hybrid-digital (paper, data, back media approach, 181–82
again) media, 182–87 magnetic tapes, 181–82
papers (notebooks), 181 multitrack tape, 242
sketch tapes, 182 performance tapes, 181–82
tape archive, 182 sketch tapes, 182
work in progress, 187–88 tape loops, 262
Steve Reich Ensemble, 124 tape reversal, 29, 34
Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 159, 223–24 tape slowdown effects, 29
Stoltzman, Richard, 240t Tapera, Jege A., 281
stop-action sound, 163–64, 169–70 Taruskin, Richard, 24–25, 89, 159
Straight Arrow Press, 338 technique, 331
Stravinsky, Igor, 20–21, 36–37, 245 technocracy, 330–31, 335
Strickland, Edward, 4 technology, 323–39
Stringfellow, William, 143 computers, 247–52
Student Nonviolent Coordinating music notation software (MNS),
Committee (SNCC), 98 247–50, 251–52
Studies in African Music (Jones), Tehillim (1981), 2, 114–16, 131,
260, 261, 262–63, 264, 265–66, 170–71, 239–40
277–78, 304–5 commissioning, 240t
studio effects, psychedelic, 29 gankogui/makwa patterns, 295–97
Suárez, Juan, 162–63 harmonics, 78–79
Subotnik, Morton, 328–29 television, 5–6
Sugar, Frank and Margit, Tembres, Wayan, 317
144–45, 151 temporal distortions, 76, 163
Sumandhi, I Nyoman, 305, Tenzer, Michael, 9–10
312–14, 316–17 terminology, music, 243–46,
“Super Bad” (Brown), 27 251–52, 262–63
Suzuki, Dean, 224 terrorism, 93, 95–97, 113–14. See also
Syman, Stefanie, 332 WTC 9/11 (2010)
“Sympathy for the Devil” (Rolling testimonial aesthetics, 76
Stones), 22–23 Texan accents, 166–67
Symphony no. 1, mvt. 1 (Mahler), 31f Text and Commentary (Korot), 95
392 Index

theater Tubby, King, 32

documentary music theater, 75, 93 Tudor, David, 328–29
political efficacy of, 105–6 Turner, Fred, 330, 331
Théâtre de la Musique, Paris, 54 tutti recording, 270–71
The Thin White Duke tuwule or tutuwule, 271, 273
(Bowie), 297–98 Two Variations on a Watermelon.
Thomas, Michael Tilson, 7, See Improvisations on a
19–22, 34–35 Watermelon (1966)
Thomas, Mildred, 146t, 152
Thomas, Walter, 152 Uganda, 264–65
Three Movements (1986), 6, 240t Ennanga music, 278
Three Tales (2002), 2, 75–76, 89, 97, Liganda people, 298–99
103, 161, 163, 188 xylophone music, 262–63, 264, 283
3-2 clave rhythm, 26f, 26 ugliness, 11–12
time-stretching and temporal Umrhube mouthbow, 281
distortions, 76, 163 University of California, Los Angeles
timelines, 287–88 (UCLA), 316–17
timing, 337–38 University of Ghana, 260
Tomlinson, Gary, 119–20 University of Legon (Ghana), 281–82
Tommy James and the Shondells, 23
tonality variations, 2
Music for 18 Musicians, 191–212 hand-over-hand, 227–28
new, 194–95 Variations for Vibes, Pianos and
putative, 79 Strings (2005), 2
topics or themes, 89 Variations for Winds, Strings, and
Torah, 131–32 Keyboards (1979), 2, 170
Hebrew cantillation or chanting Variations on a Watermelon.
of, 37–38, 61, 62–63, 64–66, 70, See Improvisations on a
114, 119, 123 Watermelon (1966)
The Torture of Mothers (Nelson), 139, Veal, Michael, 22–23
143, 145–48, 152, 153 ventriloquism, musical, 292
totalitarianism, 58, 331 Vermont Counterpoint (1982),
Tourine, Alain, 331 240t, 241–42, 243–44,
Tracey, Andrew, 278, 285, 305 245–46, 249–50
Tracey, Hugh, 277, 278, 281–82, 305 vernacular music, 36–38
traditional music, 37–38, 277, 297 Vesalii Icones (Davies), 19–20
traditionalism, 2 video, documentary music, 75, 93
trance rituals, 311 “Videotape and a Composer”
translation, simultaneous, 123–24 (1975), 119
treble-dominated approach, 199 Village Theater, Lower
Tregear, Peter, 173 Manhattan, 154
tresillo rhythms, 26f, 26–27, 31 Village Voice, 242, 337
Index 393

violence: artistic responses to, 162 West German Radio, Cologne, 240t
Violin Phase (1967), 61, 241 Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR),
inherent patterns, 264–65 54–55, 328–29
resulting patterns, 229–30 Western art music, 251–52
updated version (See Vermont Western classical tradition,
Counterpoint (1982)) 53–70, 79
Visama Vṛtti Prāṇāyāma, 338–39 “A Whiter Shade of Pale” (Procol
vocabulary, music, 243–46, Harum), 36–37
251–52, 262–63 Whitesell, Lloyd, 140
voice “Whitey on the Moon”
grain of, 162–64 (Scott-Heron), 34–35
recorded, 10, 79–81, 82 Whitney Museum of American
self-present, 118–19 Art, 323
in text, 124–27 The Who, 22–23
Vox Continental organs, 23 “Whole Lotta Love” (Led
Zeppelin), 27
Wagner, Richard, 97–98 Wilson, Ransom, 240t, 241
Wala people, 282–83 Wilson, Robert, 56
Walker, Junior (Jr.), 37–38, 262 witness, secondary, 106
Warburton, Dan, 4 Wlodarski, Amy Lynn, 76, 106
Wasserman, Emily, 329 Wollheim, Richard, 259–60
Wasserpfeifen in New York: Woodley, Ronald, 67, 79
Musikalische Avantgarde “Wooly Bully” (Sam the Sham and
zwischen Ideologie und the Pharoahs), 23
Elektronik (Water Pipes/Bongs word(s)
in New York: Musical Avant- logocentrism, 9, 127, 128–29, 130
Garde Between Ideology and political words, 11–12
Electronics) (documentary), 326, Reich’s selection of words and
327f, 328–29 voices, 79–81
“watermelon” harmony, 24f, 24–25 World to Come (afterlife),
Watson, Chris, 247 167–71, 173
Wayfarer’s prayer, 173 World to Come (Concerto)
WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk), (Lang), 167–71
54–55, 328–29 World Trade Center
We Insist! Freedom Now (Candid 9/11 attacks, 95–97, 113–14,
Records), 144 159–60, 164
Weill, Kurt, 93 1993 bombing, 161, 172
The Well-Tempered Clavier World’s Fair (1964), 150–51
(Bach), 167–71 Wright, Robin, 5–6
Prelude no. 1, 168, 169f, 169 writing-as-speech, 127, 129–30
West African drumming, 260. See Writings about Music (1974), 7, 217,
also African music 229–30, 243, 305
394 Index

Writings on Music, 1965–2000 (2002), yoga, 9–10, 328, 331–32, 333–34, 335,
5, 7, 139, 217 337, 338–39
wtc. See World to Come Hatha Yoga, 332, 333
(Concerto) (Lang) postural (Āsana), 332
“WTC” (initials), 167–71 Yom Kippur War, 98–99
WTC 9/11 (2010), 9, 89 You Are (Variations) (2004),
“9/11,” 160 2, 295–97
“2010,” 160 “You Really Got Me” (The
autobiographical elements, 172 Kinks), 27
digital documents, 188 Young, La Monte, 37–38
docu-music style, 159–73 “Young Turks,” 246
harmonic reductions, 169,
170–71f, 170–71 Zambia, 261, 264–66
interviews, 164–65, 165t, Bemba people, 298–99
166–67 Icila dance, 262–63, 265–66, 278,
opening, 162–63, 170f 283–86, 289–91, 298–99
pitch framework, 167 Lala people, 277–78, 298–99
source material, 162–63, Zezuru people: makwa handclapping
164–65, 165f patterns, 283–89, 286–88f,
stop-action sound, 163 293–97, 298–99
third movement, 167–68, Zimbabwe, 264–65
169–70, 170f Bira ceremony, 286
“WTC,” 160 Korekore people, 298–99
makwa handclapping
xenophobia, 113–14 patterns, 283–89, 286–88f,
Xhosa Umrhube mouthbow, 281 293–97, 298–99
Xizambi friction bow, 281 Matepe music, 278
xylophone music, 262–63, 264, 283 Mbira dza Vadzimu music, 278,
Amadinda, 298–99 281, 289–91
Banda Linda scale, 270 rhythmic patterns, 287
Zionism, 98–100
Yale University, 32 zither music, 262–63
yaviri, 271 Zulu praise poetry, 281