A spiritual quest

Want to laugh? (Doctors say it’s healthy.) Locate the third edition of the late Harold C. Schonberg’s book The Lives of the Great Composers and read what he had to say about the classical-music genre known as minimalism.

Pulling no punches, Schonberg called it a “kind of baby music.” “Where serialism,” he wrote, “was the most complicated, dissonant, highly structured, and intellectualized music ever conceived by the human mind, minimalism was the simplest, basing itself on nothing much more than common diatonic triads twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.”

Not laughing yet? How about this? “One could listen to this flow of sequential patterns with no intellectual strain at all. Indeed, it was anti-intellectual. It was also hypnotically soothing. One floated in an amniotic sea of sound.” “All it seems to demand,” he added, “is stamina on the part of the listener.”

OK. Maybe you had to be there. But if you were, you’ll at least find yourself chuckling. And you’ll do so because what Schonberg said is true.

But what if you were “there” because you liked feeling hypnotically soothed while amniotically afloat? And what if you didn’t care whether you were using your brain because you don’t listen to music for that reason anyway? What if, in other words, minimalism is not a branch, or a reaction to a branch, of “serious” music at all but an experimental kind of pop?

If you spend the 20-or-so hours that it takes to absorb the new—and only sometimes soothing, hypnotic, or amniotic—26-CD, one-DVD Steve Reich box Collected Works (Nonesuch), such a thesis will seem plausible if nothing else.

The terms that come up the most in analyses of Reich’s music are “pulse,” “patterns,” “rhythm,” “phase shifting,” and—surprise—“repetition.” But while in his early pieces “harmony and melody [to quote Schonberg again] were abolished,” Reich gradually began weaving them in. He eventually added singers and large-ensemble elements to his palette, the better to accommodate his increasingly serious statements.

These statements came to include portions of Psalms 19, 34, 18, and 150 (in Hebrew) in his 1981 work Tehillim (Disc 7 in Collected Works) and Jewish, Muslim, and man-on-the-street reflections on Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, and Isaac in his 1993 “multimedia opera” The Cave (Discs 12 and 13). These pieces, like his other multimedia opera Three Tales (the DVD), have more in common with Laurie Anderson’s performance art or Glenn Gould’s Solitude Trilogy than they do the canon of Western music. Reich's most recent work, Jacob’s Ladder (Disc 26) is based on Genesis 28:12.

A self-described “traditional” Jew, Reich, who turned 88 last fall, imbues these projects with a sense of spiritual quest. Taken together, they don’t feel “minimal” at all.