Why is minimalist music so repetitive? correllisflute
The term “minimalist” was invented when Michael Nyman was a more music critic than a composer, but the type of music that I and people like me deal with has a much smaller change than people are used to hearing. The number of repetitions is the nature of the music. In my early works, like the rain and the piano stages, everything moves very slowly. Some say, “I’m not listening to it because I’m in hell,” but people who are experiencing a different kind of listening.
Not only is David Bowie influenced by your work from his Berlin days, but your applause music is also sampled in a remix of Bowie’s Love Hypnosis James Murphy (Hello Steve Reich Mix). What do you remember about your conversation with Bowie in 1978? McScootikins
He played music for 18 musicians on the final line of New York. This was my first time playing at a rock club. David Bowie then appeared and introduced himself and was photographed, but it was actually one of the very short post-concert conversations. What really mattered was the exchange of mutual praise. I was very happy to meet him there and he said he had heard us perform a piece in Berlin before. It was good to come with me. James Murphy Remix is a strange combination that appears to be working. Sometimes you ask what people are doing with your music and say, “What did they do to me?” But it sounded really interesting. I wanted to hear it again.
What was the last “kit” you bought? lasagneiscancelled
My “kit” from the perspective of drum kits would be a 20-inch Jill Giant Ride Cymbal in 1952 or 1953. Much later, when I was music trained at Cornell (University), Juilliard (Conservatoire), and Mills College, completely dedicated to playing everything I wrote for my ensemble, I was able to get four very high quality bongo drums and three marimbas afterwards. Luckily, my late artist friend, Sol Lewitt, bought some of my scores as a collection of artworks that included original scores for four organs, and with that money I bought three Glockenspiels. That was the last kit I bought! I am 88 years old. I’m using configuration software, but please don’t keep up with gadgets.
I am an art handler at the Royal Academy. When you started, I heard that you and Philip Glass moved art. Is that true? robinreadbest
Yes, no. We made things go, but it wasn’t art, it was a big, smelly mattress and a sofa up and down the east staircase on the east side of Manhattan. We both lacked money and Phil had a panel truck, so he said: “We’re going to form a moving company.” I think it was called Chelsea Light Moment. For a few weeks we received all of these downtown orders from people who had these walk-up apartments in heavy furniture. It was a regressive, hernia-inducing task. So we looked at each other and said, “All is enough.”
After spending such a long time, how did you feel about playing with Philip Glass again in 2014? Was it important that the first job you did that night was four organs? Trumansdad
Phil and I were in Juilliard together, but much later (1967) he came to my concert at the Park Place Art Gallery in New York and said, “I really like what you do. Do you want to see what I’m doing?” The following year, he wrote two pages for Steve Reich, basically filming a series of patterns, and repeated them for a long time. After that we traveled together and toured and shared an ensemble. And at one point it got a little closer for comfort and suddenly my best friend became the person I had not spoken to.
That’s what Bob Hurwitz of Nonesuch Records wanted to do that we shared the evening from the early 1970s until 2014. He took us to dinner and I said (to the glass): “Hello, how are you?” The deal was that I would play part of Phil and he would play one of me. He played four organs, both of which were performed in 1970, but I played music in 12 parts, one of my early works that I played in his ensemble. The whole thing worked very well, and we… we don’t hang out, but it broke the ice and made things more humane.
Remember Fill Lesh from Grateful Dead? A stable diet
I met him in a class at Mills University with Italian composer Luciano Belio. We started hitting it and hanging out. At the time, Phil Lesch was writing works for these orchestras such as Stockhausen and Berio. He didn’t play bass, but he did play the trumpet. We did what “even happen” in San Francisco around 1962 or 1963 and worked with electronics. He was driving a taxi and I worked at the post office so we pooled our income and bought a really good tape recorder. We spent a lot of time together, and one day he went to meet his old friend, Jerry Garcia. We were in touch for a bit. He was a good guy, a truly amazing musician and a positive force.
Do contemporary classical composers, especially pioneering minimalism, listen to disco? Or punk rock? dmitry_s
Phil Lesh and I listened to the Beatles and gained great praise from Paul McCartney over the years. Punk and Disco really didn’t grab me, but what really did was radio heads from other generations. I did a concert in Krakow, and the other big attraction at the time was Johnny Greenwood from Radio Head. I thought his version was great – the more rocky counterpart of Pat Metheny’s Giatzier version – and we really hit it. Later, discovering Radiohead music impressed me very much. I was inspired to write Radio Rewrite based on two Radiohead songs.
My favourite music for the past 30 years is music for 18 musicians. Do you feel that such long forms of musical works have faded away due to the modern way of consuming music as individual short “tracks”? Bogman Fan
Some pieces should be short. Applause music is 4 or 5 minutes. It’s boring, too short, too short! Meanwhile, as a composer, he says that music should be about 55 minutes for 18 musicians. I understand that people don’t necessarily have 55 minutes and that Apple Music and Spotify prefer to listen to shorter tracks rather than to move bigger ones. I don’t run a world, but if there’s another planet we should go to, let me know.
Does art play a meaningful role in countering the recent direction of American politics? Armhole
We all hope that we can do that, but we can’t. Here is my favorite example. One of Picasso’s biggest works, Guernica, was created by Franco, a fascist dictator and friend of Hitler, shortly after the bombing of the town of Guernica, Spain. Picasso read about it and created this anti-war masterpiece from the images in his head. Then there were the bombings of Dresden, Nagasaki, Hiroshima and the September 11th. So, if the scale of its greatness is ineffective at all, then the limits of art and music must be realized.
Your work, such as Tehilim, reflects a deeper engagement with your Jewish heritage and history. Do you think your music is a form of spiritual or religious expression? Nicholas Ross
Yes, but there is a long history of music being attached to religious expression. I would never have written four organs if I hadn’t thought of Perotin, a composer of Notre Dame in the 12th century using decorative melodies around the drone. In Tehillim (Hebrew for “poetry sal”), I used my background to write within a Western tuning system. I started by singing the poem sal. It has definitely become an extreme, ever-changing meter, influenced by Bartok and Strabinsky. And then I jumped out a completely different way of organizing music rhythmically. It’s a very important piece to me, and I think Hallelujah at the end is one of the best I’ve written.
It incorporates genres ranging from Western music to West African drums, gamelans and jazz. Are there any common aspects that keep musical discourse together? makeitadouble
Very simply, in some respects, they all have a harmonic center. When I was a student in the 1950s, Stockhausen, Blues and John Cage all had no harmony centers and no regular beats either. I was able to recognize excellence, but it always felt uncomfortable. Finally I said: “I can’t do this.” When I was studying at Berio and writing 12 tone music, I instead filmed 12 different notes on the piano and grouped them into groups of three to harmonize. He was a great guy and very flexible, he said: “If you want to write tone music, why?” He opened the door to what I was trying to do intuitively.
Steve Reich’s 27-disc box set collection works are available on Nonsuch
