Box Set Deep-Dive, Play It Again, Steve - Minimalism and more from Steve Reich

My first encounter with Steve Reich’s music was over fifty years ago as a skint newlywed in a small attic bedsit. With no funds to buy – or even rent – a TV, we had two sets placed next to each other on the windowsill, one with vision and no sound, the other with sound and no vision. One night lolloping on the bed goggle-eyed, I tuned in to a bunch of musicians playing what seemed like an endless sequence of repetitions. Then, unbelieving that anyone could fashion music out of such a deceptively simple process, I began to really listen.

The work in question was Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians, represented on this new Collected Works set by two recordings (discs 5 and 27), the first mixed between 1996 and 1997, the second, a 2011 PIAS/Harmonia Mundi recording issued under license to Nonesuch - though the differences between the two versions, each with hypnotic pulse patterns that harmonically change at the prompt of a vibraphone, are minimal. You submit to ‘MEM’ and are hooked for the duration: here is a man who melds the intellect with the senses. Not for Reich hardcore discordance locked in a padded cell, but endless journeys where you soak up the passing scenery, stimulated further by the rhythmic pounding of wheels on tracks though never with a hint of aggression.

Reich’s temperament is intense, yes, but never intimidating. Our first meeting was at a Hampstead café. I’d been given the opportunity to interview him at short notice, but my shorthand was rusty and I had no compact tape recorder to hand. So I had to borrow my wife’s clunky boombox. Once face to face, Reich looked me up and down, then eyed the clumsy contraption under my arm and said, smiling, “Am I going to speak into this, or are we going to bop to it?”

The ice thus broken, I was awestruck by his pin-sharp thinking, delivered at speed, his depth and breadth of vision and the warmth of his personality. We were to meet on two further occasions, but I can honestly say that for me Reich has created a foot-tapping Shangri-la that transforms our thoughts and beliefs from mundane sectarian or denominational groupings (though Reich’s Jewishness is a crucial aspect of his own spiritual life) to somewhere beyond, where we can rest content on cloud nine, high above the creaky workings of the world as we know it. Reich’s distinctive pulses, whether regular or irregular, transport, us while much of his vocal writing is reminiscent of the earliest music masters - the polyphonic innovator Pérotin, for example.

Reich’s latest work, Jacob’s Ladder (disc 26) was premiered in 2023 by the New York Philharmonic under Jaap van Zweden, who perform it here, inspired by the biblical episode about Jacob’s dream of a ladder set on earth to reach heaven. Interesting that Reich’s own translation refers to G-d’s messengers who ascend and descend the ladder without the central ‘o’ vowel, much as any Orthodox Jew would to preserve the Sanctity of the Holy Name. The music, which is hyperactive, suggests messengers viewed from a distance like scurrying ants, right up until the closing moments. Daniel Variations (disc 19) refers simultaneously to words from The Book of Daniel (about frightening visions) and a Californian Jewish American whose murder by fundamentalists was videotaped. The music, although characteristically mobile, is distinctly uneasy.

Words have always been central to the Reichian enterprise, right from his first major work: the tape composition (a landmark in process music) It’s Gonna Rain (1965). Alongside Come Out (1966, both tape-loop pieces are on disc 1) these works constantly change shape and spatiality, ingeniously playing on sibilancies, the effect like percussion jostling along the sidelines. Different Trains (1988, Disc 10) is one of the last century’s masterpieces, its three sections (‘America – Before the War’, ‘Europe – During the War’, ‘After the War’) calling on voices from America and Holocaust survivors, with wailing train whistles and changes of pace to fit the differing locations.

Then there’s The Cave (1990-1993, discs 12-13), where the spoken contribution intensifies. The Cave itself, located in the Arab town of Hebron, is the burial place for Abraham’s wife Sarah and is therefore of significance to all three principal Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) which brings with it an urgent sense of contemporary narrative, much intensified by Reich’s music (which opens, as would any writer’s manuscript in progress, with the pounding of fingers on electromechanical keys). Tehillim (Psalms, disc 7) falls easily on the ear, its combination of voices and gentle percussion, an otherworldly celebration. It marked a turning point for Reich away from his minimalistic instrumental works, and didn’t please everyone.

But perhaps the real prize among the works involving voices is Three Tales ('Hindenburg' [both the man and the ill-fated airship], 'Bikini' [the nuclear tests which took place in the 1940s and 50s], and 'Dolly' [the sheep cloned in 1997], which also feature on the DVD, disc 17, with the added aid Beryl Korot’s brilliant video).

Equally urgent, as commentary on modern times, is City Life (1995, disc 14) and, most especially, WTC 9/11 (2010, disc 21). At first, I wondered whether Reich had ingeniously woven music from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier into his memorial for the 9/11 tragedy...but no, WTC 9/11 has no tricks up its sleeve and like Different Trains leads us to the devastating location (Reich’s own home city – he was on the phone checking on relatives for hours). Other vocal works include The Desert Music (1983, after William Carlos Williams, disc 8), his second piece involving a chorus.

Returning to purely instrumental compositions, Reich had written Four Organs back in 1970 (two versions are included in the set, on discs 2 and 6), in essence one chord that keeps getting longer, with a shuffling maraca for consistent company. The versions on offer here differ in that on the second (played by Bang on a Can – the first’s line-up features Reich and Philip Glass), aside from shifting shifts in perspective, the organs’ wide vibrato virtually keeps time with the maraca.

Perhaps the most famous and therapeutically rewarding of Reich’s works is Drumming (1970-1971, disc 3), like standing on an empty sun-scorched beach with the waves lapping over your feet, never quite the same on successive occasions. The work is in four parts, the first played on four pairs of tuned bongos, the second for marimbas and female voices, the third (and brightest) for three glockenspiels, whistler and piccolos and the fourth of the complete ensemble. If only the world’s community functioned so beautifully...this is where Reich’s output levels with the best work of even his most feted predecessors.

Also included here: the Brandenburg Concerto-like Duet, the manic Six Pianos and its softer-option version Six Marimbas, the various solo ‘Counterpoint’ works, the sensual Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ, multifariously shaded ensemble pieces, Four Sections with its opulently scored first movement, Daniel Variations, Double Sextet, Radio Rewrite, Runner, Reich/Richter and much more. And to sum up? Forget all the ‘stuck in a groove’ clichés (as promoted by successive editions of a long unavailable book of record reviews), Steve Reich doesn’t have to sound difficult to prove his worth. He is in my view the world’s greatest living composer who as he heads towards his ninth decade fully deserves this superbly annotated, beautifully presented and technically impeccable collection. The playing and singing constantly deliver throughout.