Five Questions for Composer Steve Reich

On the cusp of his 90th birthday, the music legend discusses his influences (civil rights, Bach, liturgy) and his influence — including how he discovered a technique that changed everything.

Growing up, the composer Steve Reich was exposed to plenty of music. His mother was a Broadway performer and lyricist, so there were show tunes, of course, but also Haydn, Brahms, Beethoven, and the Venetian folk music he was required to play as part of his piano lessons. Little of it moved him, though. Then he heard Bach. “When I was 14, my friend played a recording of the fifth Brandenburg Concerto for me, and my whole outlook changed. I listened to every Bach recording I could get my hands on.”  

Reich was deep in the clutches of the jazz greats too. “I couldn’t get enough of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, and particularly Kenny Clarke, an incredible bebop drummer,” he says. In fact, it was listening to Clarke that prompted Reich to drop his piano training to learn drums. Now nearly 90, Reich is renowned for changing the way that the Western world views percussion.

Honing his musical perspective at Cornell University — “I realized it was music written before 1770 and then jumping into the 20th century that moved me” — Reich continued to feed his appetite for interesting tonality and rhythmic structures with everything from Gregorian chants to Ella Fitzgerald’s vocalese. Then while working with the San Francisco Tape Music Center, a storied hub of experimental electronic music and multimedia, he recorded the voice of a street preacher and made a discovery that would change music forever.

We spoke with Reich about that “aha” moment — and the incredible body of sacred and secular masterworks he’s composed since — in anticipation of Trinity Church’s five-concert series celebrating Reich this fall.  

Modern musicians such as Brian Eno say they were dramatically impacted by your early tape-looped pieces — snippets of speech and political in nature. How and why did you create them?

My opus one, so to speak, came in 1965. It’s called “It's Gonna Rain,” which is a quote from a Black Pentecostal preacher I recorded in Union Square in San Francisco in late 1964. He was preaching about Noah and the flood three years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. We all thought we were going to be blown to radioactive dust, so his preaching about the end of the world hit home in a way it might not have if the real-world situation had been different. He was preaching forcefully and melodically, and at the moment he said, “It’s going to rain,” a pigeon took off, right on cue. On the looped tape, it’s like there’s a little pigeon drummer.

Because of that song, a few years later a civil rights advocate asked me to help edit tapes of the Harlem Six [young men arrested for murder during the 1964 Harlem uprising] to use at a benefit to raise money for their retrial. I wasn’t involved in the movement, but I was sympathetic, so I was happy to volunteer my time. I’d also been looking for another snippet, or “speech melody,” and I found it in one of the young men’s description of a beating he’d taken in jail: “I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.” I used it to create a piece called “Come Out,” which got a lot of attention and ended up being an important piece in the Civil Rights movement. The situation shows how important art can be to help recall pivotal events.

The technique you innovated, known as “phasing,” continues to have a significant impact on musicians and composers; it’s now a part of percussionists’ DNA. How did you come to it?

It began with that first loop of the preacher. I had two little tape recorders and had a plan to arrange two loops of that same snippet to be exactly 180 degrees out of sync. I pressed the start buttons on both machines, and the odds against it were pretty steep, but they happened to start in perfect unison. The sound appeared in the center of my head because the left ear was hearing what the right ear was hearing at exactly the same time. Soon though, the voice began to sort of shake and shimmer, as I noticed the left-hand loop was creeping ahead very gradually at first, creating a kind of halo of sound. I was transfixed, listening as it reverberated and then began to generate strange interlocking patterns and sub-words. Eventually, I got to the midpoint I had originally wanted but realized that getting there had been much more interesting than actually being there. So I let the loop keep going, and lo and behold, slowly it went back to unison, and I thought, “Wow, now that’s a new musical form that’s being generated by this process.”  

I didn’t want to be a mad scientist trapped in a lab making tape loops the rest of my life, so I became determined to figure out how this could be done live. I recorded a pattern on the piano and made a tape loop of that. Then I sat down at the piano again and said, “OK, I’m the second tape recorder.” I began to play in unison with the tape before moving ahead ever so gradually, one sixteenth note at a time. The sound I was discovering was exhilarating. But I didn’t want to go on stage with a tape recorder, so the next step was to have a friend play with me on a second piano. I asked him to play the phrase while I joined him in unison then gradually moved ahead. The hard part for him was to not come with me — for a musician, that pull is as strong as a vacuum cleaner! You have to really work to resist it. We managed to play the whole thing through, and the experiment resulted in the piece “Piano Phase.” That whole period of my career was devoted to exploiting the phasing process in different ways, from “It’s Gonna Rain” in 1965 through “Drumming” in 1971.

Trinity’s musicians, joined by Sandbox Percussion, will spend a special evening performing that pivotal piece, Drumming. How does phasing mold it, and what should we listen for?

Drumming is essentially built around a single fundamental 12-unit rhythmic pattern, or phrase. The exhilarating thing that happens with this technique is that even though you are repeating the same phrase, the resulting patterns change because of the distance between the first and second voice. And because those voices are always moving, the pattern is always changing — sometimes in a confused way, sometimes in a crystal-clear way. Then it disappears and something else appears. It is repeating, but it is also constantly generating new material.

Listen for the voices and the piccolos. The patterns and melodies generated by phasing are highlighted by women’s voices, some of which are doubled by piccolos. But the piece is also challenging to play. Performers have to control their musicianship so carefully, making it rewarding to tackle.

After Tehillim, a piece you call one of the top three you’ve written, premiered in 1981, you began to be recognized as a composer of sacred music. Set to a psalm, its rhythm and vocal layering launches listeners into a kind of transcendent, meditative state. What inspired you to compose it?  

While studying African and Balinese music, I learned how much of it is tied to religious practice, and that made me realize that I didn’t know anything about my own Judaism. So I traveled and began studying, asking a cantor in New York to teach me about the traditional liturgy, the Hebrew language, chanting patterns, and the melodies of daily, Sabbath, and High Holiday services. One thing I learned is that the chant for most of the prayers was rather fixed. Jews have been forced to move all over the globe, and the music was of course affected by where they settled. But because of the cadence of the Hebrew language, the structure never changed, and that makes it interesting for the kind of composing I do.  

When I was asked to compose a sacred piece, I knew I wanted to use a psalm, because they were written to be sung and have been set by composers from Pérotin and Bach to Stravinsky. But those composers all used a Latin translation; no one had set a psalm in its original language. I started singing the 19th Psalm in Hebrew over and over in my head, and all of a sudden, I was hearing it in constantly changing meters — not because I was thinking as a composer that it would be a good idea but because it intuitively arose from following the stress of the words.  

How does work by Bach — a specialty of Trinity’s musicians — connect to your own aesthetic?

It might not seem obvious, but his work is attractive to a drummer because it has a regular rhythm. In the Romantic era, the conductor had to be a virtuoso because in pieces by someone like Brahms, nobody knew where the beat was. But Bach could conduct from the keyboard, and the musicians would have no problem keeping the steady rhythm. This carries over into the singing in his cantatas as well, which I have been drawn to since I was young and that I love as much now as I did then.  

It’s the same with voices trained for early music. In Pérotin’s 12th-century chants and on up to Bach, I hear a wonderful clear voice — non-vibrato, not projected beyond what is natural, sung naturally. That is because it was sung in a church where the listeners were fairly close to the performers. In Bach’s cantatas, the voices are solo voices, but they are not dramatic and reaching, like you get in an opera like Rigoletto or Madame Butterfly. Because so much of Bach’s work is liturgical and written for church, the voice has an entirely different projection, since the text it is delivering is the important part. To me, it’s like hearing Ella Fitzgerald imitating an instrument and using no words. It’s the kind of attitude that is right for my compositions too. So having my pieces played by Trinity’s musicians who specialize in music written before 1750 makes me confident that I will be in good hands!

This fall, Trinity’s musicians team up with the groundbreaking quartet Sandbox Percussion in “Legacy of Steve Reich,” a free five-concert series that celebrates Reich’s influence. Reserve your spot.