Nonesuch’s handsome annotation includes a highly amusing anecdote relating to a performance of Reich’s Four Organs. “A restlessness began to sweep through the crowd,” writes Michael Tilson Thomas; “… rustlings of programmes, overly loud coughs, compulsive seat-shifting, gradually mixed with groans and hostile exclamations crescendoing into a true cacophony … . One woman walked down the aisle and repeatedly banged her head on the front of the stage wailing, ‘stop, stop, I confess’.” I can sympathize. A visitor to my front room reacted to the tape-loop composition It’s Gonna Rain (where repeated words set up a hypnotic ‘pulse’ pattern) by pondering how the poor chap could possibly have had the time to catch his breath, while another, knowing I was about to interview Reich, advised me not to ask him about the weather: “You’ll never hear the end of it,” he said wryly.
Pierrot lunaire inspired parallel jibes, as did The Rite of Spring. “So, is Reich’s work on their level?” I hear you ask. And my answer has to be, with certain reservations, a decisive “yes”. The fact that Reich’s rhythmic computations are easily analysable (or at least most of them are), eminently listenable and – worst of all, at least in some people’s minds – actually enjoyable should not mask their craftsman-like employment or the beauty of their structural contexts. A work like Music for 18 Musicians (1976) has real form, with darkening ‘pulses’ at the beginning, middle and end, variations that relate to each other and, ultimately, an ineffable sense of ‘arriving’ that only the very finest works inspire. “Steve Reich: Works 1965-1995” includes a handful of new recordings, among which Music for 18 Musicians is unquestionably the most significant. Comparing it with the hugely successful 1978 recording on ECM (which, incidentally, was engineered by – and originally scheduled for release on – DG) finds the newer version longer by some ten minutes, slighter quicker in a couple of sections (3a and 9), but mostly more relaxed and certainly better recorded. The balance between instruments is notably different from before (maracas, pianos and mallet instruments are frequently less prominent), and ensemble is rather less watertight (compare the somewhat ragged top line at 1'58'' into section 6 – on track 8 – with the more disciplined reading of same passage on ECM, at 33'14''). The two recordings complement each other, the one being more precise, motoric and hard hitting (ECM), the other, rather more free, more ‘unbuttoned’. A third version, featuring Ensemble Modern with Reich as a guest performer, is currently in preparation (RCA). Incidentally, should ECM ever decide to reissue their version in the future, I strongly advise inserting track points between the sections. The current edition has none.
Other newcomers include Reich’s first commercial recording of his own Eight lines (1979), a subtle rearranging of another ECM hit, Octet. Again, the newer version is marginally more laid-back than before, though in this case the sheer intensity of the original Octet – especially its scorching central climax – isn’t matched by the re-make. An earlier CD of Eight lines (Ransom Wilson, on EMI, 3/87 – nla) added an unauthorized bass part (“which made it sound like Tubby the Tuba,” Reich told me recently), but the new disc is definitely preferable. Evan Ziporyn makes dapper work of the multi-tracked, all-clarinet New York Counterpoint (1985), employing slap-tongue techniques that, again to quote Reich, sound “like a banjo doubling bass clarinet”. The last of the new releases is Four Organs (1970), a 16-minute presentation of a dominant eleventh chord, distended and dissected until all you are left with is an A with an E on top. Reich stretches the one basic harmony to the insistent shuffle of maracas, though the actual idea seems to me more interesting theoretically than its realization in performance – in this instance, a very good one.
The rest of the set presents the considerable fruits of Reich’s past collaborations with Nonesuch. The two exceptions are the ‘tape-loop’ pieces Come Out (1966) and It’s Gonna Rain (1965), both of which originally appeared on American Columbia LPs, the first on the cheap Odyssey label (as part of a mixed concert), the second in tandem with Paul Zukofsky’s daringly measured account of Violin Phase (1967, an important Reich recording which has never, to my knowledge, reappeared on CD). Come Out takes the spoken fragment “come out to show them”, repeats it, then treats its more percussive elements (the sibilants in “to show”) as central. It’s Gonna Rain, on the other hand, lets the words of a Pentecostal preacher (usefully backed by propulsive foot-tapping) gain ferocious rhythmic impetus in the first half, then circulate a dizzying array of sonorities – with longer word samples plus traffic noise – in the second half. Both make for compulsive listening, and never mind what the neighbours think.
Piano Phase (1967) is a neat precursor of the manic but mesmerizing Six Pianos (1973), another orgy of pulsing rhythms and textual ‘crossings-over’ presented here in its softer-grained Six Marimbas guise (arranged in 1986). Reich’s immaculate and rhythmically relentless presentation of the original (DG, 9/89) still weaves its spell, but Six Marimbas makes for rather more palatable listening. The first widely available recording of Drumming (1971) – a truly epic affair – is included as part of the same DG set that includes Six Pianos (three LPs now whittled down to two CDs), but Reich’s 1987 digital remake is faster, more gutsy and occupies considerably less in the way of disc space (there’s virtually half-an-hour’s difference in playing time between the two). The last of the DG ‘duplications’ is Music for mallet instruments, voices and organ (1973), a beautiful piece that cries out for the extra lustre, clarity and physicality that Nonesuch’s vastly superior recording grants it.
The period from 1984 to 1987 witnessed a change of axis in Reich’s writing, although the delightful 1981 psalms-setting, Tehillim – presented here under Reinbert de Leeuw in a performance that seems to me less vital than ECM’s predecessor under George Manahan – stands as a sort of shining bridge between the ensemble pieces and The Desert Music (1984). Reich himself has always held The Desert Music in high regard, but I have never really liked the piece. Reich’s skill at using words as musical material – as he does so expertly in the tape-loop pieces, Different Trains, The Cave, City Life, or indeed via the phonetic elements of Hebrew in Tehillim – is not, in my view, matched by a parallel talent for setting words to music. The principal problem with The Desert Music is that meaning, melody, colour and rhythm don’t ‘connect’ in the way that they do elsewhere in Reich’s work – and Sextet (1985) seems to me merely a grey-textured instrumental extension of a musical cul-de-sac that Reich would soon abandon.
Three Movements (1986) and The Four Sections (1987) both date from that same three-year period and both have good moments (the latter is, I think, the better piece), though I find the quasi-Sacre-style off-beat accents in the last of the Three Movements irritatingly cliched. The Brooklyn performance of The Desert Music is superb, whereas the LSO versions of Three Movements and The Four Sections are rather more effortful.
Still, my opinions on the music are profoundly personal, and, in any case, many readers will not share them. As to Different Trains (1988), no praise could be high enough for a work that melds the music of natural speech with its notated mirror-images, and uses sirens more meaningfully than anyone else in musical history – including Varese. Reich’s rhythmically fired tone-painting of youthful train journeys and the truck-shuttling of condemned fellow Jews in Europe is both riveting and immensely moving. City Life (1994) – with its pile-drivers and shouting voices – is similarly absorbing and if the audio-visual The Cave (1993) doesn’t hit target in quite the same way (both works employ compositional techniques similar to Different Trains), Reich’s own 72-minute distillation is eminently more listenable than the original two-CD set (3/96). Taken as a whole, The Cave doesn’t really work on disc – that is, as divorced from the purely visual aspects of the score; but the new ‘highlights’ should win it many new friends.
So, what is left? The joyful Clapping Music (1972), the jazz-inflected Electric Counterpoint (1987), the warm-textured Nagoya Marimbas (1994) and the thoughtful Proverb (1995) – all superbly realized. And what’s missing? Only pieces that Nonesuch have so far not recorded, including Violin Phase, the Variations for winds, strings and keyboards (1980) and Music for Large Ensemble (1978). I would strongly advise readers to supplement this wonderful set with the small but worthy corpus of Reich material already available on ECM and DG, but if it has to be just one purchase, then this should certainly be it. Reich’s world is full of interest and wonderful surprises. True, he has his musical precedents (Beethoven in the first movement of the Pastoral Symphony, Bach in canon, Wagner descending to Nibelheim), but so have most other significant composers. As John Adams writes of him in the Nonesuch booklet, “He didn’t reinvent the wheel so much as he showed us a new way to ride”. '