Reich reverberations

This weekend the Barbican celebrates the music of Steve Reich. Philip Clark meets the musical revolutionary

Steve Reich celebrated at the Barbican (photo: Wonge Bergmann)

What I feel about my early pieces – things like Come Out and Piano Phase – and actually in general, the most important thing about any piece of music is the emotional effect it has on the listener. But aim for that effect and you will never achieve it. So what do you do? Well, I’ve always thought you must go about your business in the best possible way you can as a craftsman, using your inside emotional drive, and hopefully it’ll all work out.”

Excuse the duplicity, but that’s the quote I used to sign off the last article I wrote about Steve Reich, back in 2003 when he was promoting Three Tales. It was a terrible interview – essentially a conversation between two men who didn’t want to be there. I had savage man-flu and a word-weary Reich had been holed up in a hotel room all day fielding journalists’ questions. I was last in line and atchoo’ed my way through enough questions, which Reich dutifully answered, to get the story, but only subsequently did I realise what a revealing nugget he had handed me, something well worth repeating here. And through the desensitising filter of Nurofen, there was one other standout moment: Reich suddenly mimicked an archetypal conductor down-beat that was loaded with “feeling” – think Bernstein or Kleiber – and said “I got no truck with that”.

Memories which rewind through my mind as, once again, I prepare to speak to Reich. That faux-conductor down-beat? What exactly did Reich mean by that? I’m intrigued, too, to ask those follow-up questions about aiming, or rather not aiming, for emotional effect that my feverish flu placed off-limits last time. And the time is right – Reich is 75 this year, a milestone that the Barbican Centre in London is marking with a weekend of concerts under the banner “Reverberations: The Influence of Steve Reich”, suggesting that the influence of Steve Reich is a phenomenon at least as important as the music of Steve Reich. At home in New York State (he and his wife moved from their downtown Manhattan apartment a few years ago), Reich is noticeably more at ease, although behind his effortless warmth and charm lurks a combative edge. Some questions are tossed back – “well, what do you think?”, “where did you get that quote?” – and with half our allotted time gone, he reminds me that there’s still much ground to be covered.

I remind Reich of our earlier interview, and how his words about emotional effect have remained with me. “Well, I agree with myself!” he laughs. I explain that I admire Come Out, his 1966 composition for tape which is based, like its companion piece It’s Gonna Rain, on a recorded fragment of speech, re-recorded over two tape recorders, one of which gradually falls out of sync so that the speech patterns stutter, then freewheel, towards abstract sound – because its expressive impact is achieved purely through sound. Nowhere does Reich attempt to manipulate this through emotive shifts of harmony or theatrical flourishes which, given that the piece is based on recordings of a black teenager beaten up by the police during the Harlem riots of 1964, shows admirable dignity and restraint. Come Out doesn’t ask “isn’t it terrible what happened?”; rather it transforms a moment in history into a different type of art altogether, part documentary, part music, leaving the rest to the audience’s discretion.

“It was very important to establish that the kid’s voice sounds like it does and he’s talking about a riot situation in Harlem,” Reich explains. “Then his voice turns into this loop, and the loop begins to create the work. Using these generative processes, which lay all the cards on the table, there are enough mysteries to be satisfying. In these early pieces, there’s a tension between the bare bones concept – one thing staying put, something else getting faster – and the result of that process, which is totally a more intense experience.”

As a description of how music operates, Steve, I say, that almost sounds banal. “So long as the music doesn’t sound banal, or else we’re in trouble. But that’s what a lot of musicians of a serial persuasion who were ruling the roost in the 1960s and ’70s said. They would look at a score like Piano Phase and tell me there was nothing there. And my answer to that: you go play it.”

Piano Phase, Violin Phase and the lesser-known Reed Phase applied the lessons Reich had learnt from Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain to an instrumental canvas. One player keeps a melodic figure running steady as the second player inches slightly ahead; the process is enthralling because the original melody is progressively stripped of its context but remains subliminally active. Then Reich wrote Four Organs, in which a single chord is gradually stretched and augmented around a rhythmic chug-a-chug framework provided by a pair of maracas. Throughout the 1970s, Reich developed these basic concepts into ever grander and more ambitious structures; Drumming and Music for 18 Musicians moved Reich from the cult underground to as overground as one can get, as people started to call this new music “minimalism”.