THE SIXTY-YEAR REICH

Flash-forward almost a quarter of a century. Steve Reich has, somehow, reached the age of 60 and is more a grand old man than the brash, badboy minimalist who so alarmed that 1973 audience. Minimalism — the lulling, stupefying repetition of brief musical phrases — has become all-pervasive in the intervening years. Reich’s record label, Nonesuch, a proud purveyor of the avant-garde, the “uncommercial,” and the outright weird, has just released a 10disc set, which charts the composer’s progress from the mid- 1960s to the present. Nonesuch is careful not to call it a retrospective; Reich still has new frontiers to discover, the company likes to think. But the set testifies to a movement, a sensibility, and a man, revealing much of what is laudable and regrettable in the musical culture today.

Born in 1936, Reich was weaned on traditional Western music. But at the age of 14, he made a fateful decision: He gave up the piano for the snare drum. It is not every day that a gifted kid does such a thing, for while no instrument presents broader possibilities than the piano, perhaps none presents as few as the snare drum. It was like choosing to leave Oz for Kansas. But already Reich was paring down, engaging in the act of reduction and elimination that is the hallmark of the minimalist style. Simple percussion would dominate the rest of his life.

Reich attended Cornell University, where he studied philosophy and played in a rock band. He had thought to make his name as a philosopher — and he still makes forays into that discipline — but he felt the tug of composition and enrolled at Juilliard. Later, he moved to California, where he studied under Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio, two of the most daring composers of the day.

Soon, Reich was at the heart of the counterculture, living a beatnik existence in San Francisco. He developed a process called “phasing”: You play copies of a single tape on two separate machines (which are bound to contain subtle mechanical differences); they begin in unison, but gradually go out of sync (or “out of phase”) and thus give the impression of a round. Reich found a black Pentecostalist preacher, Brother Walter, down at Union Square and recorded some of his exhortations. The encounter resulted in two of the pieces that set American music on its heels: It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966).

It’s Gonna Rain begins with a full 13 seconds of Brother Walter’s rantings about the Flood. It then settles on just three words — those of the title. The words are repeated over and over, in slightly varying rhythm, for about eight minutes. These are not eight ordinary minutes, as you may spend while reading a magazine or watering the garden; they are long, punishing, headache-inducing minutes. Then it is time for Part II. The words assume the character of drumming, or tribal chants. This is primitive music, a seeming advance, but actually a return to early man, with interestingly arranged grunts and nothing so mature as melody. By the end, it is a cacophony of almost unbearable ugliness, conveying pointless distress. It turns out that the raw, untampered-with preaching of Brother Walter is the most listenable and musical part of the piece.

Come Out had its debut in New York’s Town Hall at a benefit for the murderous gang known as the “Harlem Six.” It too uses a single phrase — the blunt “Come out.” It is something like rap music, of the crudest sort, or a record that is stuck. There is, in fact, hardly any music in it at all, as commonly understood. It is instead an exercise in rhythm and tape recording, in which a sole, elementary pattern dissolves into nothingness. The maracas that accompany the words sound like crickets in the night, and they leaven the monotony somewhat, creating a countermonotony of their own. How does Reich know when to stop? Does it matter? Does he end the piece only when he — -even he, at long last has tired of it? Eventually, it merely fades out, like a rock song.

The Brother Walter pieces may be thought of as music to do drugs by, and, indeed, many have raised the question about Reich’s early works, Do you need to be under the influence of drugs to like them? Certainly many of Reich’s admirers were, and are. These “phase” experiments — fascinating, maybe, but unlovable — are somewhat like Rorschach tests, in which listeners are invited to hear what they wish. Reich recalls the time when someone told him that he heard the words “black rhino, black rhino” in It’s Gonna Rain. Reich answered, “Well, if you heard it, that’s what you heard.” In 1970, Reich went off to Ghana, where he studied drumming with the masters of the Ewe tribe. He contracted malaria and had to leave after only five months, but he brought home with him the inspiration for Drumming (1971), a piece for percussion ensemble that has been shortened to an hour for the Nonesuch set. Reich’s defenders assert that it requires discipline to listen to the piece and that those who lack it are missing something; others might contend that it takes, instead, incuriosity, a contentment with too little for too long. Reich knows more music than his Ewe mentors, but it is unclear that he has improved significantly on them. Take a 10-minute phone call, return to the piece, and nothing of importance has changed. Reich demands patience, but music is not ideally an endurance test.

After his immersion in African music and Indonesian gamelan music (which he absorbed in Berkeley and Seattle), Reich turned inward, finding what he has called his “religious gene.” “People in the 1950s and ’60s,” he has said, ” often felt they were without a home, a complete unknown — there was no ethnic underpinning.” So he “had to discover where I came from” and “wound up looking under my own bed.” His first Jewish piece was Tehillim (1981), a group of three Psalms, sung in Hebrew. Tehillim still echoes the primitive, but that mode is appropriate for these songs; Tehillim is lovely, Westernized. Reich chose particularly well in his use of Psalm 150: ” Praise Him with drum and dance, praise Him with strings and winds, Praise Him with sounding cymbals, praise Him with clanging cymbals . . .”

The Desert Music (1984) also employs words — those of William Carlos Williams but suffers from its length and suffocating sameness. True, it conjures up the gentle motions and aridness of the desert (not to mention what being out in the sun too long can do), but, like so much else in Reich, it seems like a practice piece, something a student is assigned to do before the real composition begins.

Which leads to the central problem of minimalism: its incompleteness. Minimalism is painting with a single color, showing forth a single form, ad nauseam. With the minimalists, the process, the technique, is often the main thing, and it is vulgarly exposed, at the expense of art. Shakespeare may have written his sonnets with 10 perfect syllables per line — unvarying — but the method is not the glory of these poems, and the reader scarcely notices it.

Reich says about Four Organs that it is “the longest V-I cadence in the history of Western music.” He is no doubt right (the reference is to chords), but is this something to brag about? No, it is just Guinness Book of World Records, for-the-hell-of-it stuff, musically purposeless. Reich admires his fellow minimalist Arvo Part — by whom he says he is “knocked out” — but Part seems to deploy minimalism to musical (and mystical) ends, while Reich frequently seems satisfied with the marvel of his own cleverness.

In 1988, Reich scored an unabashed popular success with Different Trains, written for the Kronos Quartet, chamber-music guardian of the new. The recording of it sold more than 100,000 copies — astonishing for a “classical” album — and won a Grammy award. The piece, composed for string quartet and taped voices, relates the story of two locomotives — a perfect aural subject for Reich’s style. One train bears him and his family on a pleasure trip in America during World War II; the other is in Europe and bears other children to the camps. The pleasantness of the first locomotive is drowned in the chaos and menace of the second, as an accented voice (culled from historical archives) says, “1940,” and, “on my birthday.” The piece is profoundly disturbing and perhaps just slightly exploitative — as with so many works that borrow from and comment on the Holocaust — but it is undeniably affecting.

Reich is at his most effective when he relaxes his grip on the technical reins and allows his imagination to roam a little. He found an audience beyond his Haight-Ashbury and SoHo core with his Music for 18 Musicians (1976), which is not merely an interesting but a beautiful work. He includes in it crescendos and decrescendos, plus exotica like bass clarinets, which is not a lot to ask for but in Reich is really something. Similarly, Sextet (1985) avails itself of a comparatively wide array of tools, playful and brooding against the ticktock of the relentless Reichian pulse. The Four Sections (1987) is one of only a handful of Reich pieces for orchestra. It is — unusual for Reich — unambiguously American, carrying the impress of Aaron Copland, Waiter Piston, and Leonard Bernstein.

Then there is The Cave (1993). How to describe it? Reich himself allows, with extreme understatement, “It’s a hard piece to describe.” It is not quite an opera; it is not quite a documentary. It uses music — instrumental and choral — and videotaped interviews. Call it a documentary-like quasi- opera, or a multimedia expression of political-musical theater.

The piece is Reich’s attempt to sort out the unyielding problems of the Middle East. (The “cave” of the title is the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Abraham, Sarah, and their descendants are said to be buried.) Reich uses the voices and opinions of Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land and of Americans back home (including black Americans and American Indians, who vent their own grievances). “I think it’s an extremely politically relevant piece of work,” Reich has said, which means The Cave has all the makings of a p.c. nightmare. But instead it is serious, searching, even enthralling.

It begins with typing on a computer (Reich’s obligatory percussion). The question is then posed, Who was Abraham? The participants give their various responses. Reich both makes the music follow the speech and manipulates the speech (via tape) so that it conforms to his musical conceptions. Verses from Genesis are sung between spoken comments. One of the movements features nothing but the ambient sound within the cave (along with what the composer refers to as “an A-minor drone”); you can make out the vague, dim sounds of a guided tour underway. Many of the Americans are well known: Richard Serra, Carl Sagan, Arthur Danto, Dennis Prager, and Daniel Berrigan. The Cave will not often be performed — it is extremely problematic and expensive to stage (“a glorious white elephant,” Reich calls it) — but the excerpt on the Nonesuch compendium is, as is usually the case with Reich, more than enough.

Reich’s most recent recorded work is among his most emblematic: 1995’s Proverb, for voices, electric organs, and vibraphones (which are virtually omnipresent throughout Reich’s oeuvre). The singers have but a single line of prose, plucked from the philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein. It stands for Reich’s entire mission: “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.” Reich’s minimalist primitivism contains elements of Gregorian chant, and indeed Proverb has an exceedingly strange commissioning status: It was ordered up both by the BBC for its hundredth anniversary and by the Early Music Festival of Utrecht. So does minimalism reach back in time for the sparest sounds and thoughts, defining what is most modern by what is most ancient.

As Reich’s fellow composer John Adams says, minimalism is an act of “spring- cleaning,” made necessary by “a certain critical mass of complexity, beyond which lies only sterile mannerism.” At moments, Reich, Philip Glass, and the other minimalists — who are typically viewed as terribly advanced and beyond the comprehension of their detractors — seem light years behind Hildegard of Bingen, the medieval abbess who thrilled to the countless possibilities of actual notes.

Steve Reich is unquestionably a brilliant man. He is almost a musical scientist, an inventor who knows what he is doing and can explain to anyone why (as the great composers normally cannot). He is obviously more than a New Age dabbler, trading off the elite culture’s near-blind affection for anything radical. But his works lack a fundamental musicality. For him, the process is too alluring, and too cramped, even of late, when he has permitted it some breathing room. Reich is sadly vulnerable to gimmicks, to musically unnecessary (and distracting) tricks. Ravel cared about the structure of his Bolero, which represents a sort of proto-minimalism, but the piece is, above all — despite its bastardization by Hollywood — a work of breathtaking loveliness, shrewdly paced and concluded on time. Minimalist composers, when they are alert, step in to rescue us before the onset of coma; but Reich is habitually too late.

Reich can complain no more that he is misunderstood and unappreciated. He is a lion of the culture, a world-renowned icon, critically almost untouchable. But it must be that even those mavens who grin and bear it — who soldier through the music that other people have trouble being polite about — occasionally murmur to themselves, “Stop, stop, I confess.”

Jay Nordlinger is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.