Steve Reich: ‘We all wish art could counter the direction of US politics. But it can't'

The Guardian

20-03-2025

Why does minimalist music consist of so much repetition? Correllisflute
The word 'minimalist' was invented by Michael Nyman when he was more of a music critic than a composer, but the kind of music that I and people like me deal with has changes on a much smaller scale than people are used to hearing. The number of repetitions is the nature of the music. On my early pieces, such as It's Gonna Rain or Piano Phase, everything moves so slowly. Some people will say: 'To hell with it, I'm not listening to that,' but those who do experience a different kind of listening.
Not only was David Bowie influenced by your work during his Berlin era, but also your Clapping Music is sampled on the hypnotic James Murphy remix of Bowie's Love Is Lost (Hello Steve Reich Mix). What do you recall of your conversations with Bowie in 1978? McScootikins
We played Music for 18 Musicians at the Bottom Line in New York, the first time we'd played it in a rock club. Afterwards, David Bowie came up and introduced himself and a photograph was taken, but really it was one of the very short post-concert conversations. It was the exchange of mutual admiration that really mattered. I was so delighted to see him there and he told me he'd heard us play the piece before, in Berlin. It was a nice coming together. The James Murphy remix is an odd combination that seems to work. Sometimes, you hear what people do with your music and think: 'What have they done to me?' But that sounded really interesting. I wanted to hear it again.
What was the last piece of 'kit' you bought? LasagneIsCancelled
'Kit' in terms of my drum kit would be a 20in Zildjian ride cymbal in 1952 or 1953, which was my pride and joy as a drummer who wanted to sound like Kenny Clarke and bebop. Much later, when I had musical training at Cornell [University], Juilliard [conservatoire] and Mills College and was totally dedicated to performing whatever I wrote for my own ensemble, I was able to get four pairs of very high-quality bongo drums and then three marimbas, which wiped me out financially. Fortunately, my late artist friend Sol LeWitt bought some of my scores as a collection of art pieces, including the original score of Four Organs, and with that money I bought three glockenspiels, which were the finishing touches on Drumming [1971]. That was the last kit I bought! I'm 88 years old. I use composition software, but don't keep up with gadgets.
I am an art handler at the Royal Academy. I heard a story that, when you started out, you and Philip Glass moved art around. Is that true? Robinreadbest
Yes and no. We moved things around, but it wasn't art, it was big, smelly mattresses and couches up and down stairs in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We were both short of money and Phil had a panel truck, so he said: 'We're going to form a moving company.' I think it was called Chelsea Light Moving. For a couple of weeks, we got all these downtown orders from people who had these walk-up apartments with heavy furniture. It was backbreaking, hernia-inducing work. So we looked at each other and said: 'Enough is enough.'
How did it feel to play with Philip Glass again in 2014 after such a very long time? Was it significant that the first work you performed that evening was Four Organs? Trumansdad
Phil and I had been at Juilliard together, but much later [in 1967] he came to my concert at the Park Place art gallery in New York and said: 'I really like what you're doing. Would you like to come over and see what I'm doing?' The following year, he wrote Two Pages for Steve Reich, basically taking a set of patterns, repeating them and making them longer, which was the breakthrough for him in the way phasing was for me. After that, we travelled and toured together, shared an ensemble – and then at some point it got a little close for comfort and suddenly my best friend became somebody I didn't talk to.
That persisted from the early 1970s until 2014, when Nonesuch Records' Bob Hurwitz wanted to do something where we shared the evening. He took us out for dinner and I said [to Glass]: 'Hi. How are you?' The deal was I'd play a piece of Phil's and he'd play one of mine. He played Four Organs, which we'd both played on in 1970, and I played Music in 12 Parts, one of the early pieces I'd played in his ensemble. The whole thing went very well and we … we don't hang out, but it broke the ice and just made things a lot more humane.
Do you remember the Grateful Dead's Phil Lesh? Steady-diet
I met him in a class at Mills College with the Italian composer Luciano Berio. We hit it off and started to hang out. At that time, Phil Lesh was writing these orchestral pieces à la Stockhausen or Berio – he didn't play the bass, but did play trumpet. We did a 'happening' in San Francisco sometime around 1962 or 1963 and worked together on the electronics. He was driving a cab and I was working at the post office, so we pooled our incomes to buy a really good tape recorder. We spent a lot of time together, then one day he went to see his old friend Jerry Garcia and, the next thing I knew, he was the bass player with the Grateful Dead. We stayed in touch a little bit. He was a good man, a really great musician and a positive force.
Do contemporary classical composers, in particular pioneers minimalism, listen to disco? Or even punk rock? Dmitry_S
Phil Lesh and I both listened to the Beatles and over the years I've grown to have an enormous admiration for Paul McCartney. Punk and disco didn't really grab me, but the next thing that really did was Radiohead, from a whole other generation. I had a concert in Kraków and the other big attraction there at the time was Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, who unbeknownst to me had done his own version of my Electric Counterpoint, which is for electric guitar. I thought his version was great – a rockier counterpart to Pat Metheny's jazzier version – and we really hit it off. Then, discovering Radiohead's music impressed me so much. I was inspired to write Radio Rewrite, based on two Radiohead songs, which I'd never have written if I'd not gone through that whole experience with Jonny.
My favourite piece of music for the past 30 years has been Music for 18 Musicians. Do you feel longform pieces of music like this are disappearing due to the modern way of consuming music as individual, shorter 'tracks'? Bogmanfan
Some pieces should be short. Clapping Music is four or five minutes – any longer and it's boring, any shorter and it's too short! On the other hand, as a composer, the music tells me Music for 18 Musicians should be about 55 minutes. I understand that people don't necessarily have 55 minutes and that Apple Music and Spotify prefer us to listen to shorter tracks, rather than dice up something larger. I don't run the world, but if there's another planet that we should go to, let me know.
Can art play any meaningful role in countering the recent direction of US politics? Armhole
We all wish it could, but it can't. I have a favourite example. One of Picasso's greatest works, Guernica, was made shortly after the bombing of the town of Guernica in Spain by Franco, the fascist dictator and friend of Hitler's. Picasso read about it and created this antiwar masterpiece from the images in his head. Afterwards, we had the bombing of Dresden, Nagasaki, Hiroshima and then 9/11. So if that scale of greatness can have no effect whatsoever, we need to realise the limitations of art and music.
Your works, such as Tehillim, reflect a deep engagement with your Jewish heritage and history. Do you see your music as a form of spiritual or religious expression? NicolasRos
Yes, but there's a long history of music being attached to religious expression. I'd never have written Four Organs if I hadn't been thinking about the 12th-century Notre Dame cathedral composer Pérotin's use of decorative melodies around a drone. With Tehillim [Hebrew for 'psalms'], I was using my own background and writing within the western tuning system. I started by singing psalms, which got me into extreme, constantly changing meters – undoubtedly influenced by Bartók and Stravinsky – and then out popped a whole different way of rhythmically organising music. It was a pivotal piece for me and I think the hallelujah at the end is one of the best things that I've written.
You've incorporated genres from western music to west African drumming, gamelan and jazz. Is there a common aspect that keeps the musical discourse together? makeitadouble
Very simply, in some ways, they all have a harmonic centre. When I was a student in the 1950s, Stockhausen, Boulez and John Cage all had no harmonic centre and no regular beat. I could recognise the excellence, but always felt uncomfortable. Eventually I said: 'I can't do this.' When I studied with Berio and was writing 12-tone music, instead I took the 12 different notes of the piano and grouped them in groups of three, to sort of be in harmony. Being a great guy and very flexible, he said: 'If you want to write tonal music, then why don't you?' He opened the door to what I was intuitively trying to do.
Steve Reich's 27-disc box set Collected Works is out now on Nonesuch