Music Book Review: Conversations by Steve Reich

Conversations
by Steve Reich (Music 780.92 Rei)

Steve Reich is one of America’s most admired living composers. His career has lasted so long that he has gone from being thought of as an avant-gardist in the 1960s to being recognized as one of the most important figures in classical music of the 20th century and beyond. His work has had an obvious influence on much music in multiple genres that has followed, both sonically and in terms of technical approaches to sound. And he’s still writing great music in his 80s!

 

Like a few other artists whose books we’ve talked about in the last year, the COVID-19 pandemic provided a challenging time where concerts were cancelled, and some musicians diverted their focus to writing, both music and memoirs. That period is starting to lead to a few very interesting “pandemic project” books including Conversations, a product of Reich checking in with other friends, composers and musicians. In his brief preface, Reich notes that one of his favorite music books is Stravinsky in Conversation with Robert Craft, and he decided that he wanted to write this book, a quasi-memoir, in the form of many conversations with people who have been significant in his life.

 

This simple structural plan for the book is a fantastic reflection on the kind of contributions Reich has made to music: before Reich and the other minimalists of his generation like Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and John Adams, there was a long period where composers were thought of as mythical and mostly solitary figures, carrying their mysterious talents almost as burdens best endured alone. The minimalists turned much of the public perception of this around almost immediately by working as composer-performers, often leading and performing in their own ensembles, and sometimes playing with and for one another. As their music embraces the inherently social nature of most music-making, it’s really fun to see that reflected even in Reich’s approach to a memoir, bouncing thoughts off others whose opinions matter to him.

 

This makes for an especially interesting walk through a number of milestone pieces from Reich’s career as well, since they come up again and again in different conversations with different contexts. For some older friends and contemporaries of Reich, like sculptor Richard Serra, the talk around a piece like “Come Out” centers around first hearing it right as it was being created, and how both of them found common ground in their work back in the 60s. For the next generation like composer and performer Michael Gordon, the talk revolves more heavily around the influence that the “phase” pieces had on his musical development, and tape pieces like “Come Out” and “It’s Gonna Rain” are discussed in the context of Reich trying to create similar kinds of sonic effects in live performance. Then a wide-ranging conversation between Reich, Stephen Sondheim and moderator John Schaefer recorded at the Lincoln Center in 2015 looks into the whole span of work, which contextualizes the way that both Reich and Sondheim have worked with conversational speech sounds in their music, both directly and through imitation.

 

As I mentioned earlier, music is very much a social art form, and besides the great insights throughout this book, you really get a sense of how many people get involved in the life of a contemporary composer. There are other composers represented, and lots of musicians who have performed Reich pieces, as you might expect, but there are also record producers, conductors, and fellow travelers who work in other forms of media. And there are multiple generations of people involved at every level: the youngest artists represented may have grown up actually being influenced by Reich, but they’re making their own contributions and have their own unique relationships with him on a more personal level as well. And Reich has taken on inspiration from some of them. This comes through especially clearly in his discussion with Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, with whom their relationship led to Reich composing his “Radio Rewrite” working with the Radiohead songs “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” and “Everything In its Right Place” as starting material. His discussion with composer Nico Muhly toward the end of the book gets into similar territory, too, as Reich reflects on Muhly pieces that he wishes he’d written, and Muhly points out that there is “cross-pollination intergenerationally” happening.

Because each discussion flows freely, the book’s conversational kind of informality makes for a very pleasant reading experience. If you’re doing research on Reich or his work and you need to pinpoint the discussion around particular pieces, though, there is a handy index at the back of the book to help you find all of the right references. But I think one of the best parts about the book is that it can be enjoyed by a wide audience—you don’t have to have a deep understanding of music theory to grasp most of the content here. There are many fun extramusical anecdotes related to the times and places where Reich composed pieces or performed them as well. Ultimately, Conversations is a great look both at his work and at the greater community around contemporary music since the 1960s.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try American Minimal Music: LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass by Wim Mertens, The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape by Denise VonGlahn or American Mavericks by Susan Key.)

 

( publisher’s official Conversations web page ) | ( official Steve Reich web site )

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

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