Rethinking Steve Reich’s minimalism

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Friday, May 30th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Coming next: an ear—and eye—opening 27-disc box set.

Early minimalist composers took lots of heat from classical music critics and purists.

But WORLD’s music critic, Arsenio Orteza, says maybe minimalism isn’t all that highbrow after all. Maybe it’s just pop music in disguise.

ARSENIO ORTEZA: Classical-music critics aren’t usually known for their sense of humor, but it’s hard not to laugh when reading the late Harold C. Schonberg’s takedown of the classical sub-genre known as minimalism. He called minimalism– which emerged in the mid-1960s as a reaction against the complexity of Anton Webern and Arnold Schönberg–a “kind of baby music.” He wrote that “[o]ne could listen to this flow of sequential patterns with no intellectual strain at all.” He went on to call it “anti-intellectual” and compared it to floating in an “amniotic sea of sound.” He concluded that “All it seems to demand is stamina on the part of the listener.” Schonberg may very well have had something like this piece in mind….

EXCERPT FROM “PIANO PHASE” (DISC 1, COLLECTED WORKS)

This is a composition called “Piano Phase” by the minimalist pioneer Steve Reich. Schonberg may have had a point about stamina— the piece goes on for over 20 minutes. It’s on the first of 27 discs in the new box of Reich’s work on Nonesuch Records, Collected Works. Some of what it collects is even more minimal. There is, for instance, “Clapping Music”…

EXCERPT FROM “CLAPPING MUSIC” (DISC 1, COLLECTED WORKS)

In case you can’t tell, it’s made up of two performers who repeatedly clap a pattern of 12 eighth notes. Over nearly five minutes, they slowly go out of phase with each other—then slowly come back into phase. But despite the radical simplicity of this approach, minimalism took root in the classical-music community, making that community seem experimental, edgy, and cool. It also gave listeners who never thought that they’d like traditional music reasons to explore the classical sections of record stores. In other words, Harold Schonberg’s criticisms notwithstanding, minimalism may have kept interest in classical music alive at a time in which rock and roll was telling Beethoven to roll over.

In addition to “Piano Phase” and “Clapping Music,” Collected Works also contains two recordings of Reich’s best-known work, Music for 18 Musicians. Composed in the mid-1970s, the piece brought Reich’s minimalist fascination with repetition, pulse, phase shifting, and patterns to a wider audience.

EXCERPT FROM MUSIC FOR 18 MUSICIANS (DISC 5, COLLECTED WORKS)

The work made such an impact that it paved the way for the acceptance of Philip Glass. He would become minimalism’s most successful proponent. Listen to “Floe,” from Glass’s 1982 album Glassworks, and the influence of Reich is clear.

“FLOE” BY PHILIP GLASS, GLASSWORKS

So far, you might be thinking that the critic Harold Schonberg was right, and that to treat minimalism seriously is to fail to see that the emperor has no clothes. But Steve Reich, who turned 88 last October, has been composing for over 60 years. And like any devoted craftsman, he has developed beyond the rudiments of his beginnings. Besides, what if, instead of a broken link in the evolution of serious music, minimalism is really an unusually experimental kind of pop? What if the anti-intellectualism and amniotic comforts that Schonberg decried are practically necessary ingredients? If you take the 20-or-so hours necessary to absorb Reich’s Collected Works, the thesis certainly seems possible.

EXCERPT FROM THE CAVE, ACT III, SCENE 2: “WHO IS SARAH?” (DISC 13, COLLECTED WORKS)

Discs 12 and 13 of Collected Works contain the audio of The Cave, a 1993 multi-media opera. It sets the reflections of various Jews, Muslims, and men and women on the street to speech-inflected music. They ponder Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, and Isaac. It’s one of several large-scale works in which Reich began making greater use of harmony and melody. It also has more in common with performance art than it does with Beethoven, Mozart, or Bach.

EXCERPT FROM TEHILLIM, PART IV (FAST): (DISC 7, COLLECTED WORKS)

The set also contains Reich’s 1981 work Tehillim, vocal settings—in Hebrew—of four Psalms, and his most recent works, Jacob’s Ladder and Traveler’s Prayer, both also based on scripture.

EXCERPT FROM TRAVELER’S PRAYER (DISC 27, COLLECTED WORKS)

The Biblical motifs are no accident. Reich, who has described himself as a “traditional Jew,” has been exploring the faith of his fathers for decades. So for him, the scriptural texts that he uses are not public-domain tropes but markers along a path that he has not only taken but taken seriously. They make the last two thirds of his career seem like a spiritual quest. Heard from this perspective, many of his “collected works” don’t feel “minimal” at all.

EXCERPT FROM TRAVELER’S PRAYER (DISK 27, COLLECTED WORKS)

I’m Arsenio Orteza.

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