Celebrating minimalist composer Steve Reich

David Bianculli (0:00)

This is Fresh Air, I'm David Bianculli. Composer Steve Reich celebrates his 90th birthday tomorrow, October 3rd. Often called one of the fathers of minimalist music, Reich created a vocabulary that has influenced nearly every form of music, classical, electronic, jazz and pop. Musical venues and performers around the world are marking the occasion. And at 89, Reich still is making new music. Here's audio from the world premiere of his latest piece called In All Your Ways, unveiled and recorded at the Edinburgh International Festival. His composition is performed by the Colin Curry Group.

That's an excerpt from the world premiere of the brand new composition by Steve Reich called In All Your Ways. It was performed by the Colin Curry Group at the Edinburgh International Festival. We'll hear more of this piece at the end of the show.

Today on Fresh Air, to celebrate the 90th birthday of Steve Reich, we'd like to offer our own retrospective of his career. Let's start with a 1999 interview with Terry Gross. Terry asked him about one of his early compositions, recorded in 1965, called It's Going to Rain.

Terry Gross (1:56)

This is a tape manipulation piece. What principle were you working with in this piece?

Steve Reich (2:02)

Well, I guess really the bottom line principle was that sometimes when people speak, they almost sing. And there's no better example of that than a black Pentecostal preacher, who's really, it's impossible to say if they're singing or speaking. It's hovering between the two of them. And this was a young man who called himself Brother Walter, who was in the Union Square Park of San Francisco in 64, or late 64 when I recorded him.

And he's talking or laying it down about the flood in the Bible, and Noah and the Ark. And you've got to remember that the Cuban Missile Crisis was in 62 And a lot of us were thinking that, you know, this was something hanging over everyone's head, especially in San Francisco at that particular period in the early 60s. That kind of thinking was rampant, that we could be so much radioactive dust in the next day or two. So, this seemed very appropriate for the time in history when I was living, and also I was going through some difficulties in my own life, which this speech spoke to. And I was playing with tape loops on a technical level. The tape loops are little bits of tape that are spliced together back then, so that they just go around and around and around and repeat themselves. And when you take a bit of speech like, it's going to rain the way he says it, you really begin to hear the music of what he's saying, and what he says increasingly blended together, so it's hard to separate them.

It isn't that the text disappears, it gets intensified so far as where I hear it. And then there are actually two loops of his voice going starting in unison and then one slowly creeps ahead of the other. I just did it with my thumb on the recording reel of one of the machines. And so they go, what I said was out of phase. If you like, it's like a cannon around, like row, row, row your boat, but only instead of the, you know, row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. And on the word merrily, the second voice comes in. But imagine they both started together and one just started to get faster than the other. It's hard to do.

And you'd get first a kind of shaking or reverberation, and then you'd get sort of imitation. And then gradually you'd begin to hear it as a rounder cannon. And that's exactly what happens in this piece.

Terry Gross (4:08)

Well, let's hear it. This is Steve Reich's It's Gonna Rain, originally recorded in 1965

An excerpt of Steve Reich's It's Gonna Rain, recorded in 1965 Now, I'm wondering, when you created It's Gonna Rain, were you thinking of it more on an intellectual level? I wonder what would happen if I did this type of phasing and tape manipulation, or was the kind of rhythms and the odd sounds that you were getting as a result of that tape manipulation really like aesthetically exciting to you?

Steve Reich (5:35)

Definitely the latter. I don't work as a scientist.

That's not an intellectually, it's not an emotionally rewarding way to work. I was just following my intuition, just following my nose, so to speak, and this guy's voice was fantastic. And it was full of melodic content and it was full of meaning. And so I began working with it because I sensed that there was going to be a lot happening there. Actually, the going out of phase that first happens was a kind of an accident. But when I heard it, I thought, this is fantastic. It's a kind of seamless process that goes on and on. And after doing that piece and another piece like it, I then began to apply that principle to live musicians from about 1967 to 1971 and then sort of moved on from there.