DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli. Composer Steve Reich celebrates his 90th birthday tomorrow, October 3. Often called one of the fathers of minimalist music, Reich created a vocabulary that has influenced nearly every form of music - classical, electronic, jazz and pop. Musical venues and performers around the world are marking the occasion. And at 89, Reich still is making new music. Here's audio from the world premiere of his latest piece called "In All Your Ways," unveiled and recorded at the Edinburgh International Festival. His composition is performed by the Colin Currie Group.
(SOUNDBITE OF COLIN CURRIE GROUP PERFORMANCE OF STEVE REICH'S "IN ALL YOUR WAYS")
BIANCULLI: That's an excerpt from the world premiere of the brand-new composition by Steve Reich called "In All Your Ways." It was performed by the Colin Currie Group at the Edinburgh International Festival. We'll hear more of this piece at the end of the show.
Today on FRESH AIR, to celebrate the 90th birthday of Steve Reich, we'd like to offer our own retrospective of his career. Let's start with a 1999 interview with Terry Gross. Terry asked him about one of his early compositions, recorded in 1965, called "It's Going To Rain" (ph).
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
TERRY GROSS: This is a tape manipulation piece. What principle were you working with in this piece?
STEVE REICH: Well, I guess really the bottom-line principle was that sometimes when people speak, they almost sing. And there's no better example of that than a Black Pentecostal preacher who's - really it's impossible to say if they're singing or speaking. It's hovering between the two of them. And this was a young man who called himself Brother Walter, was in the, let's see (ph), Union Square Park of San Francisco in '64 or late '64, when I recorded him.
And he's talking or laying it down about the flood in the Bible and Noah and the Ark. And you got to remember that the Cuban Missile Crisis was in '62, and a lot of us were thinking that, you know - this was something hanging over everyone's head, especially in San Francisco, at that particular period, in the early '60s, that kind of thinking was rampant, that we could be so much radioactive dust in the next day or two.
So this seemed very appropriate for the time in history when I was living, and also was going through some difficulties in my own life which this speech spoke to. And I was playing with tape loops on a technical level. The tape loops are little bits of tape that are spliced together back then, so that they just go around and around and around and repeat themselves. And when you take a bit of speech like "It's Gonna Rain," the way he says it, you really begin to hear the music of what he's saying and what he says increasingly blended together, so it's hard to separate them. It isn't that the text disappears, it's that it gets intensified so far as where I hear it.
And then there are actually two loops of his voice going, starting in unison, and then one slowly creeps ahead of the other. I just did it with my thumb on the recording reel of one of the machines. And so they go, what I said was out of phase. If you like, it's like a cannon or round like, row, row, row your boat, only instead of the, you know, row, row, row, your boat gently down the stream. And on the word merrily, the second voice comes in. But imagine they both started together, and one just started to get faster than the other. It's hard to do (laughter). And you'd get first a kind of shaking or reverberation, and then you get sort of imitation, and then gradually, you begin to hear it as a round or cannon, and that's exactly what happens in this piece.
GROSS: Well, let's hear it. This is Steve Reich's "It's Gonna Rain," originally recorded in 1965.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "IT'S GONNA RAIN")
BROTHER WALTER: He began to warn the people. He said, after a while - it's gonna rain after a while, for forty days and for forty nights. And the people didn't believe him. And they begin to laugh at him. And they begin to mock him. And they begin to say, it ain't gonna rain.
It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain. It's gonna rain.
It's gon'. It's gon'. It's gon'. It's gon'. It's gon'. It's gon'. It's gon'. It's gon'. It's gon'. It's gon'. It's gon'. It's gon'. It's gon'. It's gon'. It's gon'. It's gon'. It's gon'. It's gon'. It's gon'. It's gon'.
Gon' rain. Gon' rain. Gon' rain. Gon' rain. Gon' rain. Gon' rain. Gon' rain. Gon' rain. Gon' rain. Gon' rain. Gon' rain. Gon' rain. Gon' rain. Gon' rain. Gon' rain. Gon' rain. Gon' rain. Gon' rain. Gon' rain. Gon' rain. Gon' rain.
GROSS: It's an excerpt of Steve Reich's "It's Gonna Rain," recorded in 1965.
Now, I'm wondering when you created "It's Gonna Rain," were you thinking of it more on an intellectual level? I wonder what would happen if I did this type of phasing and tape manipulation? Or was the kind of rhythms and the odd sounds that you were getting as a result of that tape manipulation really, like, aesthetically exciting to you?
REICH: Definitely the latter. I don't work as a scientist. That's not an intellectual - it's not an emotionally rewarding way to work. I was just following my intuition, just following my nose, so to speak. And this guy's voice was fantastic. And it was full of melodic content, and it was full of meaning. And so I began working with it because I sensed that, you know, there would be a lot happening there. Actually, the going out of phase that first happens was kind of an accident, but when I heard it, I thought, this is fantastic. It's a kind of seamless process that, you know, goes on and on. After doing that piece and another piece like it, I then began to apply that principle to live musicians from about 1967 to 1971 and then sort of moved on from there.
GROSS: Let's skip ahead to 1971 and another little groundbreaking piece that you did called drumming. Now, you wrote this after studying African drumming and Balinese gamelan music. Are there things that you took from those musics that you applied to drumming?
REICH: Well, not really. But let's put it this way. Particularly, gamelan drumming acted as a kind of huge pat on the back or green light. I was - I started studying drums when I was a kid. I was actually 14. First, I was studying piano, and then I finally heard bebop, Miles Davis and the drummer Kenny Clarke, when I was 14, and I immediately fell in love with that. And I had a friend who was a better piano player than I was. So I became a drummer, and when I had gone through a music school and sort of swept that under the rug, so to speak, when I got out - after Juilliard and Mills College in 1963, I said to myself, well, where in the world is drumming the main voice in the orchestra, so to speak? And the answer to that is two places - in West Africa, or, I guess, in East Africa as well, and in Indonesia. What happened was - in a nutshell was that I felt very strongly that I didn't want to come back and, you know, imitate the sound of African drums or African bells or, either, Balinese instruments. They're very beautiful. They're very pretty, but they have their own history. They have their own tradition. They have their own context. And for me, it just felt totally out of place.
The bottom line was this. I found the thinking, the way the African drumming is organized, which is basically short patterns in what we would call subdivisions of 12/8, little patterns in three, patterns in four, patterns in six, superimpose so that their downbeats don't coincide. So if you say, well, where's the downbeat? Where's the one? Well, the answer is the rattle has it here. The bell has it there. This drum has it, you know, somewhere else. That's a totally different way of organizing music than you find here in the West.
And that idea travels very easily. It doesn't say anything about sound. You could have a - let's say, you know, take flutes (ph) of a preacher's voice or musical instruments, musical instruments tuned to our scale. So there's no imitation of any African instruments or of any specific African drumming patterns. But the idea of having - of being able to make a music which is richer than all the electronics that were being made at that time.
And, remember, we're talking in 1971. Stockhausen is working with a bank of equipment. John Cage is working with banks of equipment. And I felt, well, you know, drums, skin, metal glockenspiels, wooden marimbas and the richness of the sound that comes out of those instruments, especially when they're piled on top of each other - multiple marimbas, multiple drums, multiple glockenspiels - is far richer an experience than sine waves being sent out at you.
GROSS: We're going to hear the beginning of the second movement of drumming. You want to say a little bit about what's happening in this part?
REICH: Well, that's interesting. The second movement is for three marimbas played by up to nine players and two women's voices. Well, what are the women's voices doing? When I started writing the piece, I was working with a multitrack tape recorder. So I'd play some of the patterns, and I'd play against myself. And I'd hear, like, two or three voices at a time. And when I heard them, I thought, hey. I hear somebody singing. But, you know, there was nobody singing.
What it was was that the marimbas are pitched and have a very long decay. It's a long sound. Even though you're hitting a piece of wood, it rings for a long time 'cause there's a resonator underneath it. And it begins to sound as if there are women singing, kind of like Ella Fitzgerald - (singing) do, do, do, do, do - that kind of sound, what we used to call scat singing.
And so I thought to myself, well, this is coming from the marimbas. What if you really did have women in the room? And what if they really were listening carefully to this, it was all notated in front of them, and they began singing some of these patterns that are really there, but they would reinforce them, giving, if you like - what? - a kind of audible chalk talk? And that's exactly what's happening here. You're going to hear these marimba patterns brought to the surface of the music by the women's voices.
GROSS: Let's hear it. This is an excerpt of Steve Reich's "Drumming" from 1971.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DRUMMING")
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTISTS: (Vocalizing).
GROSS: That's an excerpt of Steve Reich's "Drumming" from 1971.
Now, I've always wondered that so many of your pieces deal with repetition and with slight variations over a long period of repetition. How do you know what is long enough? What is the appropriate length for a piece? 'Cause it doesn't have the kind of narrative arc of a melodic piece or something, you know, where there's a climax in a more traditional way. So how do you gauge the length of one of your pieces?
REICH: Well, again, Terry, I think what you said applies very well to what we just heard and maybe up to "Music For 18 Musicians" in 1976. But after that, the pieces are...
GROSS: Oh, I agree.
REICH: ...Greatly reduced (ph).
GROSS: Yeah. Absolutely.
REICH: So for these early pieces, basically, the scores and the - when written and the oral transmission of the information when it was oral were the same, which is, you can repeat this bar, I would say, to James Preiss or Russ Hartenberger or Bob Becker - who were the sort of core members of my group way back when and are still around - you know, let's say, anywhere from five to 15 times. And - but you don't - I don't want you to count those number of times. I want you to feel, well, that's clear. Now I'm going to move ahead. And so, therefore, the score reflects that. It gives you certain limits.
For instance, we made a recording of this piece of drumming for Deutsche Grammophon back, I think, in '74. And it came out to be an hour and 20 minutes long. Now, that's on the long side, but it's certainly in the ballpark. We re-recorded it for Nonesuch in '86, I think it was, and it was 56 minutes. And everybody said, oh, well, you know, they must have been shortening it for the CD. Wrong. We simply were playing it that way. It was now about 15 years after the piece was written, and the - what? - the zeitgeist or we've gotten older or whatever had changed, and we just played a little bit more tersely.
It works either way. If you play "Drumming" over and it takes you 25 minutes, that's a mistake. If you play "Drumming" and it takes you two hours, that's a mistake. But anywhere between, let's say, 55 minutes and 70 minutes, 80 minutes - that's OK. And that allows the musician, the individual player who's making - you know, who's making a decision at any given moment to simply judge it as a good musician. I'm giving that responsibility to them. They want to do something so that you really get the idea, and they don't want to bore you. So that's one of the fringe benefits of playing this kind of piece.
BIANCULLI: Composer Steve Reich speaking with Terry Gross in 1999. He turns 90 years old tomorrow. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 1999 interview with minimalist composer Steve Reich, who turns 90 tomorrow. There are celebrations and performances all over the world, including a birthday concert at Carnegie Hall on October 22.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
GROSS: When you were first playing your repetitive pieces, I was wondering if your audiences had to learn to listen in a different way and to not expect that dramatic arc of tension and release of Western melody and harmony.
REICH: Well, you know, a lot of this music has to do with a lot of Western music which is prior to 1750. As a music student, I was - I went to Cornell when I was an undergraduate. And I studied music history there with William Austin, who was a very great musician and wonderful teacher. And the way he taught Western music history was like this. He started with Gregorian chant. I think, nowadays, people taking over him might start with Hebraic chant. And he went up through the death of Johann Sebastian Bach, 1750. And the next thing he did was W.C., Duke Ellington, Gershwin, jazz, Stravinsky, Bartok. Then when all of that was done, he started again with Haydn and went up through Wagner. Now, me, I liked the first day of it, of course.
(LAUGHTER)
REICH: And that's really where I stand, where I've stood all of my life. And that's, you know, it's an intuitive choice. It's not - that's how I feel about things. And there are a lot of community of interest, if you like, between earlier music, let's say starting from about 1100 - composers like Periton and Leonin, what was called the school of organum in Paris, in the 11th and 12th century - I feel very close to. Obviously, chronologically, I couldn't be further away. But this is music which changes very slowly, which is the earliest music to work in either two, three or four voices, which is systematized to some extent, which is, I think, emotionally very powerful.
And the what are called isorhythmic techniques, or certain techniques for repetition that were found a lot in France and Belgium in 12th, 13th, 14th century, I found really exciting. I mean, I felt like I learned something from that. Sonata-allegro form, the form that drives the symphony and sonata forms, from Haydn up through Wagner is something - the narrative form with the climax and, you know, the exposition and the development and the recapitulation that you're talking about. And that is a quasi-literary form.
And there are many people who are very in love with that. And I respect that. Some of the music, there's obviously some, you know, towering geniuses who produce music like that. Personally, I'm not interested. I'd rather hear, you know, something of Bach or before than any of that period. And that's reflected in the music that you hear of mine.
GROSS: In the liner notes to the new CD retrospective, there's some notes by Michael Tilson Thomas, the conductor. And he describes playing your composition "Four Organs" in New York City. And this was pretty early in your career. And Thomas writes, in all my years as a performer, I have never seen such a reaction from an audience. There were at least three attempts to stop the performance by shouting it down. One woman walked down the aisle and repeatedly banged her head on the front of the stage, wailing, stop, stop, I confess.
REICH: (Laughter).
GROSS: The audience made so much noise that, in spite of the fact that the music was amplified, we were unable to hear one another's playing. Now, how did you feel when that happened? I think you were performing on that night.
REICH: Oh, I was, yeah.
GROSS: Yeah.
REICH: I was getting lost, along with Michael.
GROSS: (Laughter).
REICH: And he was mouthing the syllables, you know, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
GROSS: (Laughter).
REICH: And, well, you know, it really was a time bomb that I was unaware of. Michael was, at the time, one of the conductors of the Boston Symphony. And he had planned this concert of multiple - we were "Four Organs," and he had a multiple orchestra piece of Mozart. And he had a piece called the "Liszt Hexameron," which was a piece that Liszt wrote for six piano virtuosi of the day. And he had six grand pianos out there.
Well, this was a subscription concert for the BSO in New York at Carnegie Hall in 1973. And it drew the kind of audience that you might expect, which in those days was a very conservative, you know, elderly type of audience. The last thing in the world an audience like that would want to hear would be a very hard-edged piece for four screaming Farfisa electric organs amplified with maracas. So he kind of set the stage. I just wasn't paying attention to that. I was worrying about rehearsals and electrical plugs and tunings and things like that. But when it happened, I turned white as a sheet. But Michael sort of clapped me on the back and said, hey, this is history.
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: Well, did you feel like, yes, this is as exciting as "The Rite Of Spring," the audience is rebelling against this new and exciting, adventurous music? Or did you feel like, boy, is this really a mismatch?
REICH: Yeah, I think more of the latter. I'm not on the epater bourgeois, you know, let's shock people bandwagon. I really - I want people to love what I do. And I want them to really, you know, to enjoy it, to love it. And so I didn't have that feeling. Perhaps Michael was a little bit more of the provocateur at that time. He certainly had engineered a situation guaranteed to explode. And when it did, as I say, I just felt sort of taken aback and, you know, what's going on here? Maybe in the long run, you know, that was a worthwhile thing for him to have done. I've never personally tried to present myself with situations whereby that kind of reaction will happen.
BIANCULLI: Composer Steve Reich speaking with Terry Gross in 1999. Michael Tilson Thomas, the conductor Reich was talking about, died this past April. He was 81. We'll hear more of Terry's interview with Steve Reich after a break. I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF STEVE REICH AND JON GIBSON'S "FOUR ORGANS")
BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. We're continuing our career retrospective of minimalist composer Steve Reich, who turns 90 tomorrow. Several concert halls and musicians are having performances of his work. On October 22, Carnegie Hall will host a special birthday concert. Let's get back to Terry's interview with Reich from 1999.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
GROSS: Let's jump ahead to 1981 and hear an excerpt of your composition "Tehillim." Now, you talked a little bit about how you'd studied African drumming and Balinese gamelan music. At some point, you kind of explored your own roots in Jewish music, and you studied with a Jewish cantor. What sent you back to studying cantorial music?
REICH: Well, actually, it was a trip to Africa, strangely enough. When I was in Africa, besides studying music, I was - I enjoyed being, you know, being over there. It was a very, very nice period of time. And one of the things I admired was the fact that, in fact, there was no notation, as you observed earlier. Each musician was playing something that they learned from their father or their uncle or, you know, someone in their family, and it had been so passed on that way for, you know, obviously a couple thousand years or so. And I thought, you know, I came back, Gee, you know, is there anything like that that I'm a part of?
And I thought, wait a minute. I'm a member of one of the oldest groups on the planet, and I know nothing about it. I was raised as a Reform Jew, and I had zero information. I couldn't read Hebrew. I'd never studied Torah. I didn't know anything about it. I didn't know it was read in a cycle. I didn't know any of the practices. So I thought to myself, well, maybe I ought to look in my own backyard since I have the foggiest notion of what's going on there. And I ended up studying at an Orthodox synagogue in the Upper West Side of Manhattan and studying biblical Hebrew and the text of the Torah in its weekly portions.
When I was studying Hebrew, Hebrew, as you may know, is a continental language. There are no letters for vowels. There's no A, E, I, O, U. Instead, there are little dots or dashes, which are affixed below or above the consonants, and they are the vowel points. When I was studying Hebrew with my teacher, there was yet another little marking there. And I asked him. I said, well, what's that? He said, oh, that's the musical notation. I said, really? I said, well, how do I learn about that? He said, well, you have to study with a cantor to do that. So I looked up someone who was at the Jewish Theological Seminary through a mutual friend, and he taught me a little bit about how to do it and how the notation worked.
And the notation was basically - have you ever looked at a Greek vase, and you see a funny picture of a guy who looks like a conductor, and he's sort of motioning with his hands, and the musicians are looking at him? He's not a conductor. He's doing what the Greeks called chironomy. He's using his hand as a notational reminder. Hey, goes like that. And this was a common way of notating music within cultures prior to our system of notation, which, by the way, evolved from the human hand. There are five lines on the staff because there are five fingers on your hand. So...
GROSS: I didn't know that.
REICH: Yeah. Well, you know, live and learn (laughter). So I decided to set - "Tehillim" is basically the word for psalms, the original word for psalms. I took about a small piece of four different psalms and set them in the original Hebrew. And after years of doing pieces of a more unusual sort that you've heard a little bit of today, out came a piece, which was very, very melodic, in the simplest sense of the word.
GROSS: Well, let's hear the opening of "Tehillim."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TEHILLIM")
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: (Singing in Hebrew).
GROSS: That's an excerpt of Steve Reich's 1981 composition "Tehillim." One of the things I really so admire about your work as a composer is that you kind of rewrote the musical vocabulary in a way and stripped it down to some basic essentials, and then started building on that, never kind of abandoning that initial vocabulary you came up with, but always kind of adding to it.
REICH: Yeah, that's very good. That's right, Terry. Thank you.
(LAUGHTER)
REICH: That's well put. Couldn't do better myself.
GROSS: Because like, in "Tehillim," you know, you have the drumming. I think there's, like, clapping hands in it, too.
REICH: Yes, there is. Yeah.
GROSS: Kind of like your clapping-hand music. Plus, you've got the addition of the singing and the melody on top of that. You know, I'm wondering, like, when you were, say, 15 or even when you were in college and you knew you were getting really serious about music, what did you expect you were going to be doing? Before you knew that you'd be kind of writing your own musical vocabulary and coming up with your own style of composing, where did you think you were going to fit in?
REICH: Well, I mean, I was pretty worried about it because, you know, Bartok was 5, Mozart was 4 and I was 17, and I was just getting a start late. So I was very apprehensive, and I wasn't getting a great deal of support from my father, who felt I should do something a little bit more of a clear, supportive nature financially.
GROSS: What did he do for a living?
REICH: He was a lawyer. But my mother was a singer, and they were separated. They were divorced, actually, when I was 1 years old. And of course, my mother was quite supportive, but I had been brought up primarily with my father. So he had the - you know, I looked to him. But I started looking away, obviously. It was a difficult period of time, actually. I went through music school, and when I got done, I felt that I didn't want to teach, and there were no other prospects. So I just - I worked for the Yellow Cab company in San Francisco, and then I worked for the U.S. Post Office for a while. So it wasn't a rosy path. I felt a little lonely.
I felt that when I was a music student, the style of music at that time in the colleges was either like the Europeans Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio, who I was studying with, Berio, and - or John Cage, basically made non-rhythmic music, music you couldn't possibly whistle or tap your foot to. And I felt very far from that, and therefore, kind of out of it. And it was a difficult period of time, up to about '65, '66 when I finally began to hit on this and meet a few other people, people like Terry Riley, in particular, who were, you know, working in Spain.
BIANCULLI: Composer Steve Reich speaking with Terry Gross in 1999. The minimalist composer turns 90 tomorrow. There are musical celebrations around the world honoring his career. Coming up, we'll hear an excerpt of an earlier conversation Terry had with Steve Reich from 1989. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to our retrospective of composer Steve Reich, who turns 90 tomorrow. In 1989, Terry Gross spoke with Steve Reich about "Different Trains," a composition for string quartet and tape commissioned by the Kronos Quartet. The piece was inspired by Reich's childhood memories. His parents divorced when he was 1. His mother moved to Los Angeles. His father stayed in New York. And because his parents had joint custody, Reich traveled back and forth by train with his governess between the years 1939 and 1942. Looking back on the excitement of those train rides, he realized that if he'd been in Europe as a Jew, he would have been riding a train to his death. The first movement is set in America before the war.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG "DIFFERENT TRAINS: I. AMERICA - BEFORE THE WAR")
VIRGINIA: From Chicago, from Chicago, from Chicago, from Chicago to New York. From Chicago to New York. From Chicago, from Chicago, from Chicago to New York. From Chicago to New York. From Chicago to New York. From Chicago, from Chicago to New York. From Chicago.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
GROSS: You've called what you're doing in "Different Trains" a form of documentary music. That's because you're using actual sounds in it - recordings of real people's voices, real train whistles, sirens.
REICH: Yeah, absolutely. It goes back to very early pieces that you probably know, "It's Gonna Rain" and "Come Out," which were working exclusively just with a short snippet of a recorded voice. So as opposed to, let's say, setting a text, the way Schubert has done, the way every composer has done and the way I've done in, let's say, "Tehillim" or "The Desert Music," in "Different Trains," I'm not setting a text. I'm setting human beings. That's quite a different situation.
GROSS: What you did is interview the governess who took you on the train rides between New York and Los Angeles. You interviewed a Pullman porter who worked the trains on the years that you drove - that you rode on them. And you interviewed a few Holocaust survivors who are the same age as you are. And you took fragments of their speech and use that as the musical text. I find myself saying their lines over and over. It becomes kind of like music, even though it's speech that you're using.
REICH: I think what you're driving at is, how can the speech become music? Or at least I hope you are.
GROSS: Yes, exactly.
REICH: Because what happened is that I selected each of these sentences, phrases, single words, place names, dates for what they said, to be sure, but also for how they were said. Sometimes when we speak, you or I and everybody, we almost sing. We don't know it. It just goes by in our conversation. But if you isolate it on tape, then you find, for instance, in - my governess, when she was talking about one of the trips, she said, he went from Chicago to New York, and it was really - I don't have perfect pitch, but it was F, A flat, F, A flat. The Pullman porter said 1941. And the rule I set for myself was, every time a woman speaks, she'll be doubled note for note by the viola. And every time a man speaks, he'll be doubled note for note by the cello. And my job is to arrange, harmonize and write counterpoint to something that is a given that I can't change. And that was quite an enjoyable restriction.
GROSS: The first movement of "Different Trains" is set in the United States, based on your rides back and forth between 1939 and 1942 between New York and Los Angeles. The second movement is the Holocaust. And there's an incredible musical shift that happens right between the first and second movements. Would you describe for us what you're doing there?
REICH: Well, what happens right on the button is that the air raid sirens begin right as Rachella, who's a woman from Rotterdam, now living in Oregon (ph), says, 1940. Musically, I wanted to get something that would come in, like - you know, like an absolute knife stroke and just divide those movements, even though there's no time between them.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG "DIFFERENT TRAINS: II. EUROPE – DURING THE WAR")
RACHELLA: 1941, '41 I guess it must've been. 1941 I guess it must've been. 1941.1941 I guess it must've been. 1941 I guess it must've been.
1940. 1940. 1940. 1940. 1940. 1940. 1940. On my birthday.
GROSS: In the third and final movement of "Different Trains," well, the movement opens with something closer to more traditional violin playing, a string quartet playing than we've...
REICH: Right.
GROSS: ...Heard earlier on.
REICH: Right.
GROSS: Why?
REICH: Well, what happens at the beginning of the third movement is da-da, di-da, da-da, da-da, di-da, da-da, da-da, da-da, di-da, da-da. Well, you've been so used to hearing voices, you wonder what that is. Well, actually, what it is is it's Paul, the Hungarian now living in Boston, saying, and the war was over - da-da, di-da, da-da. But you don't hear him first because there has been so much speech, so much train whistle, so much siren, so much noise that the third movement begins to move away from all of this towards music, towards some kind of resolution of this situation, which, of course, can't be resolved. But there is, I think, a good attempt at that in the third movement - I think a successful attempt at it in the third movement.
What's happening in the third movement is that that paradiddle rhythm of the train has stopped and now all the rhythms, all the music are going to come out of these speech patterns. Da-da, di-da, da-da is multiplied into the cello, into the viola, into the two violins of the quartet so that when he finally says, and the war was over, his voice is surrounded, if you like, as a mosaic of tiles, each tile being, in fact, a musical rendition of what he says. There is no other train rhythm overriding that. And that's what separates the third movement from the other two movements.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DIFFERENT TRAINS: III. AFTER THE WAR")
PAUL: The war was over. The war was over. The war was over. The war was over. The war was over. The war was over – over, over.
BIANCULLI: That's an excerpt from "Different Trains" by Steve Reich. Now, let's hear some more from his latest work. This is performance audio from the world premiere performance of "In All Your Ways," performed by the Colin Currie Group at the Edinburgh International Festival.
(SOUNDBITE OF COLIN CURRIE GROUP PERFORMANCE OF STEVE REICH'S "IN ALL YOUR WAYS")
BIANCULLI: That's from "In All Your Ways," the latest composition by Steve Reich. It premiered in August as part of his 90th birthday celebrations. Reich turns 90 years old tomorrow.
Coming up, Justin Chang reviews "NAZA," a new documentary about the war in Gaza. This is FRESH AIR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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