STEVE REICH
Jul 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By James Rotondi
The next time you paste a loop into your software's arrange window as easily as you would stick a magnet on a refrigerator door, consider what working with loops must have been like before the personal computer, before WAV files and before hip-hop and electronica were even born. When Steve Reich — widely considered among the most important American composers of the past 50 years — began creating the style that came to be known as phase music or minimalism in the early '60s, he used the only tools he had available to him: live performers; spliced audio-tape loops; and, most important, a restless and resourceful imagination. That was enough to help set in motion a musical wave that still rolls every time a loop cycles in house music, techno, ambient dub and especially IDM.
Reich was a Cornell philosophy student before he began studying music, first at Juilliard and later, between '61 and '63, at Oakland, California's adventurous Mills College, where early minimalist and electronic composers such as Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros were already toying with tape loops and protosynthesizers. But Reich was principally a percussionist, and his interest in the epic, drum-based gamelan music of Bali inspired him to play with similar ideas of using short repeating figures to introduce very gradual change into a piece — a departure from the traditional Western approach to melodic development.
But it was a far less academic approach that opened the door to looping as it is now known: While walking through San Francisco's Golden Gate Park with his tape recorder one day, Reich recorded a sidewalk evangelist preaching about Noah and the biblical flood. Later, he spliced the tape into pieces and joined the ends of each piece, creating a physical tape “loop” and played them back simultaneously. As the loops went out of sync, Reich began to hear sounds created by the pulsing, or beating, of two identical sounds that are out of “phase” with each other. The pieces — It's Gonna Rain and Come Out — are landmarks in the history of loop-based music and key moments in modern classical music, part of the movement that helped classical music find a third path out of neoromanticism and mere serialism.
Reich's later work abandoned the tape-loop technique but used innovative orchestra groupings, pairs of pianists, huge percussion setups and even singers to explore the ideas that he had ignited in the early '60s. Works such as Music for 18 Musicians and Piano Phase have become the classics that informed more widely known minimalist giants such as Philip Glass, whose 1982 soundtrack for the film Koyaanisqatsi brought looping pianos and phase-music principles to the public at large. The underground, of course, was onto Reich from the beginning, and the electronic underground was to follow suit.
In 1998, Nonesuch released the superb Reich Remixed disc, a nine-song album of exemplary remixes of Reich's best-known work from a savvy cross-section of artists: Ninja Tune stalwart Coldcut tackled the masterpiece “Music for 18 Musicians”; seminal electro pioneer Mantronik respun the aptly titled “Drumming”; breakbeat giant Howie B. weaved a new “Eight Lines”; DJ Spooky exploded an epic take on “City Life”; and Andrea Parker, Ken Ishii, Nobukazu Takemura, D*Note and Tranquility Bass weigh in, as well.
Although it's not unusual for DJs and producers to sign on to tribute records, what is amazing is the way Reich's material pushed all of these artists to the top of their game and how organically Reich's pieces take to the remix treatment. Having already organized his music into loops in the analog, acoustic world, Reich was a natural to be reborn into the digital, electronic one. In both worlds, of course, imagination and resourcefulness are still more important than bells and whistles.
“The computer makes a difference,” said Reich — who uses a computer for much of his work these days — in 1998. “But it didn't make anyone who wasn't a good composer a good one. People say ‘Oh, now they've got this, they can do so and so.’ Yeah, you can now have people churning out a lot of garbage faster and in prettier-looking score. You can definitely produce it quicker, but copy and paste ain't going to make you a good composer.”
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