An Interview with Steve Reich

Steve Reich is a composer who has written music of incredible dexterity, formal complexity, and at times even austerity, but he has done this inclusive of a powerful response to the world around him. His ear remains toward the ground. And most often he leads the way. showing his listeners cogent ways of understanding the personal and super-cultural experience of music and sound, and the contexts in which these phenomenons live in the world with us.

Trajal Harrell: When was the first time you recognized that you wanted or needed technological assistance in the creation of your music?

Steve Reich: Well not so much assistance as it is a means of working in another field. The first time it happened was when I started working with tape in San Francisco in about '63.1 got involved with making tape collages and out of that I began working with tape loops which are basically taking a short bit of tape and splicing the end to the beginning and letting it run around around and around. That along with the study of African music that I was making and the fact that I had been a drummer when I was a kid led to the first pieces of mine that were actually commercially recorded, and the first pieces that I became known for, namely, It's Gonna Rain and Come Out. And they are tape pieces using the human voice as a source. They're not electronic sources. I've always been interested in real recorded sound as opposed to electronically generated sound.

TH: It seems that in your creation of It's Gonna Rain it was actually the mechanical imperfection which led to the phasing.

SR: In 1968, I had two little cheap tape recorders, little Wallensachs. I had a recording I had made of a black Pentecostal preacher in Union Square in San Francisco in '64. What I thought I was gonna do was line up these two loops so they would feel like 180 degrees apart. It's Gonna Rain would be "It's Gonna It's Gonna It's Gonna It's Gonna Rain Rain Rain Rain.".I had headphones with the jack going to one machine and one into the other. By pure chance the loops were lined up in unison. Now because the machines aren't perfect and they have slightly different running speeds and because in my editing of the two quote identical loops, undoubtedly, there were slight imperfections, they began to drift apart. The sensation of them drifting apart was like the sound moved over to the left side of my head and it seemed to go down my left shoulder then down my left leg and out to the left side of the floor. And I began to hear a kind of reverberation and then I begin to hear a kind of echo and then after a while I finally heard "It's Gonna It's Gonna It's Gonna Rain Rain Rain." I heard that relationship but I thought, "my gosh that's nice but what's really incredible is this continuous, nonstop, quite perceptible, irrational movement from unison to these various canonic relationships. I thought this is more interesting than what I had in mind, and then I began to experiment with how fast this ought to be done so that it maintained interest and at the same time let you hear things that ordinarily you wouldn't hear like the differences. Ordinarily they'd all sound the same. So, the imperfections in the tape recording and in my own tape editing became an opportunity to get into some brand new musical territory.

TH: How has your relationship to the equipment that you use in recording changed?

SR: Basically between 1967, when I finished the work with the tape, and 1988, the only technology I used was microphones to amplify the performance and loudspeakers. I like to work with live instruments but have them amplified so as to get a kind of clear detail and balance that would otherwise be unavailable. I dropped off heavy duty technology but even the use of the microphone is a profoundly important device in my music and I think in a lot of music of the 20th Century. In 1988, big, big discovery for me. I just became aware of the sampling keyboard, which was not a keyboard, at least not from my perspective, that was going to imitate a violin or a musical instrument. The sampling keyboard was a way of recording my voice, your voice, traffic, a slam of the door on a car, any sounds you like and play it within the musical ensemble at exactly the time you want. So you could integrate musical sounds, sounds from the world, sounds of things that involve you in your life, bring them literally into the music easily. So, my eyes lit up big time. And the result was Different Trains which has got to be one of the best pieces I ever did which uses sampled voices and a string quartet for Kronos Quartet.

TH: You, unlike anyone else, has been able to do something quite contemporary by creating something which is human and emotional, and yet feels at the same time to be pushing us forward, to be using things which remind people of technology. Is that something you work on balancing in the music so as to get what you want and to communicate?

SR: You're definitely onto something because Drumming is all acoustical instruments at a time when people like Stockhausen and Cage were using banks and banks and banks of equipment. So the thrust of it is on the one hand, let's just use animal/vegetable/mineral skin of an animal, wood on the marimbas, and metal on the glockenspiel. On the other hand, the repetitive techniques are undoubtedly influenced by the use of tape and recording studio blending and using a mixing board live in performance to get the kind of blend that you want. The rhythms are undoubtedly influenced by the Miles Davis-John Coltrane jazz that I was interested in. So, I think because I was genuinely interested in all that stuff and I was a drummer, then it comes out not mannered or experimental with a capital "E." It just comes out "this is what I do, what do you do?" And maybe that's why people reacted to it.