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
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
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