.........I love Steve Reich.
I love everything about Steve Reich. His music, his philosophy, his Judaism, his compositional evolution...I could go on and on.
When I started listening to minimalism back in high school, I did it mostly as a reaction towards my mother. She would complain about my lack of discipline while practicing piano and suggest that I listen to more Beethoven or Glenn Gould's Bach recordings (not to knock Gould, those recordings are masterpieces).
This only made me blast Music for 18 Musicians even louder. I explored Philip Glass, Terry Riley, John Adams...minimalism's greatest hits; but I always latched on to Steve.
For one reason, I believe it's because his process, which he discusses in depth in the article from Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music. I was so sick of identifying the recapitulations, the 'secondary themes', the fugue subjects and countersubjects, etc, that this new means of unfolding musical form was fascinating.
In Reich, all the audible facets of music come together to aid in the process. The rhythm, harmony, instrumentation, melodies change gradually over time to make subtle changes and take what was once a small amount of material, spinning out into a larger canvas of musical form and ideas.
What I also wholly appreciate about Reich is his dedication to cultural ideas and allowing it to enhance his music. Many of my favorite works are those influenced by Judaism, for example the lesser known opera "The Cave", based on the Old Testament, as well as the even lesser known yet newer "Daniel Variations". Daniel Variations strike a particular chord, as they were written after the passing of journalist Daniel Pearl, who was executed in the Middle East by terrorists. Pearl was also Jewish, and the text of the piece is drawn from Pearl's own writing and songs, as well as excerpts from the Bible. Bringing intensely deep meaning to the music, beyond the fascinating analytical aspects, really makes the strongest connection for me as a listener.
As I thought about Reich tonight, I also thought of other artistic mediums in which Steve Reich and the types of minimalism he embraced might be influential or have influenced his work. Out of the blue, I thought of French impressionist Claude Monet and his "Water Lilies" works. Monet completed around 250 of these valuable and stunning works...Many of them are subtly different, but Monet manipulates light, color, perspective and an array of other perceptions to change a single subject matter into a prolific body of works. Monet uses a different process to take each painting by, and despite using the same materials, oil and canvas (just as a composer would use an ensemble, string quartet, orchestra over and over for different works), he manages to result in a new and innovative process each time.
In this respect, Reich does similar things with his composition: for example, he is often conservative with his harmonies and tonalities, just as Monet does not use radical colors or non-lifelike perspective in his paintings.
I cannot imagine Monet was criticized for being "repetitive" in his lifetime for creating so many works surrounding water lilies alone, yet minimalists have to bear this stigma often.
We can visually see that so many of Monet's works were strikingly different and each one beautiful in its own unique way, despite that they center around the same subject matter. (scroll down to the end of the Wiki article for an array of the paintings!)
Reich himself said the following, coincidentally surrounding French impressionism, but referencing music and composers:
"The point is, if you went to Paris and dug up Debussy and said, 'Excusez-moi Monsieur…are you an impressionist?' he'd probably say 'Merde!' and go back to sleep. That is a legitimate concern of musicologists, music historians, and journalists, and it's a convenient way of referring to me, Riley, Glass, La Monte Young[...] it's become the dominant style. But, anybody who's interested in French Impressionism is interested in how different Debussy and Ravel and Satie are—and ditto for what's called minimalism. [...] Basically, those kind of words are taken from painting and sculpture, and applied to musicians who composed at the same period as that painting and sculpture was made [...].
—From an Interview with Rebecca Y. Kim, 2000
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