Steve Reich at 70

In The Nation, David Schiff looks at the composer Steve Reich as he turns 70.

In his writings Reich conveys a very logical sense of his own development. There seems to be a straight line from Clapping Music to Drumming to Music for Mallet Instruments to Six Pianos, each work building on its predecessor until Reich reaches nirvana in Music for 18 Musicians. As I came to know Reich’s oeuvre, I learned that Clapping Music actually marked the beginning of a second phase in his work, following a near-fatal trip to Ghana in 1970. In 1964 Reich had come upon phasing by accident when he was editing a tape recording of a black preacher; he misaligned two tape loops, setting in motion a process that transformed the preacher’s words into abstract sounds. The result was Reich’s opus one, It’s Gonna Rain. In 1966 he refined this technique in another piece for tape, Come Out, which premiered at a benefit concert for the retrial of the “Harlem Six,” a group of black youths charged with committing a murder during the 1964 Harlem riots. The voice of Daniel Hamm, a 19-year-old member of the Harlem Six–five of whom, including Hamm, were later acquitted–is first heard clearly saying, “I wanted to come out and show them.” The phrase “Come out and show them” is then transformed through phasing to become an evolving series of rhythms, timbres and pitches. These early works remain fascinating, but their politics is troubling. They seem to spring directly from the civil rights struggle, and yet the phasing process calls attention away from the meaning of words to their sounds. A similar critique could be made of Drumming, where Reich extracted West African rhythms from their context and imposed on them a sophisticated process of transformation unrelated to their traditional forms. Was Reich, like many modernists before him, simply going primitive?