By Max A. Cherney
Oct 3 – As one of the most prominent contemporary American composers, Steve Reich has spent more than 60 years writing minimalist music that uses pulse and repetition to define subtle shifts — a catalogue of work that has altered classical music’s conception of rhythm and structure and influenced popular artists such as David Bowie and Radiohead. At almost 90, what still genuinely piques your curiosity about material you are working on? Starting in 1985, I began to use MIDI , and I could make mock-ups entirely. In 2018, you made a playlist of some of your favorite music that included a few songs by popular artists such as Radiohead, Jr.
Because i felt it had to be done because of an intuitive feeling that the music was moving too fast all the time, but there I was doing it myself. So that’s my most intimate, real experience of that phenomena, and everything else to be kind of theoretical. Because of machine perfection, which you’ve said makes it musically unsatisfactory, you have spoken a lot in the past about how electronic music or computerized music ruins the pulse of rhythm.
Speaking with Reuters from New York, he discusses the piece, the impact of AI on music and how he thinks about — and composes — his work. The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. To start, can you walk us through your creative process? But having done that a lot, I just felt, you know, enough already. Let’s cut some new ground here. was the result. I also have recently started structuring the pieces in terms of note value, rhythmic values. It’s too fast. It’s got to slow down and really, catch its breath. So I decided I would insert slow movements into what I already had to give that breather space, which I’ve never done. A lot of composers put movements in, movements out. Me personally, I start at the beginning, go to the end. If I hit a hitch in the middle, I try to solve the problem that I’m facing at that moment. But it’s always movement forward. This was going into an almost completed piece and doing surgery. It was exciting to do something that I hadn’t done before. It was a challenge, and I think the solutions to that worked very well. How did this particular sacred text become your primary spark for this piece? I’ve been using a biblical text for quite some time. I kept it in Hebrew — Tehillim means psalms — and I think it’s one of my better pieces. A lot of my text pieces will sometimes use biblical text, and I’m not the first composer to do so by a long shot. It is the overwhelmingly favorite text of Western music, for obvious reasons. That’s a very meaningful text. What immediately bores you? If a piece starts to bore me, I trash it. I have a lot of trashed pieces. That’s something that I think every composer faces. Some people are just naturally fast composers. So in my case, I work harder. There are several pieces I have that were just good enough, but it’s really it should be something that comes from within you while you’re working. Outside of a concert hall, is there a preferred way you would like people to listen to your music? I have never given it a thought in my life. I just want them to like it. And if they don’t, well, I can’t win them all. How do you view artificial intelligence as influencing composition? Do you think AI can be creative at all? Well, artificial intelligence is big, it’s powerful, and I don’t know if we’re going to be able to outlive it. That , I don’t have any use for artificial intelligence in my own music. I do look up subjects — when you go to Wikipedia before you get there, you get some electronically generated answers, which are something short, sweet, and to the point. So I don’t deny that it can be quite useful. The question is, what’s the price for this extra gift? Nothing comes free. Everything we’ve done in the past, we get, and it changes us. Composers in my generation, we think about recording and media and whatnot. I used to compose by playing things and pre-recording myself in a multi-track way so I could put the different parts together and hear exactly what I was doing — not exactly with the instruments, but at least good imitations. But I wasn’t playing the parts; they were already generated by the computer, and that may have had an effect on my music, and probably not a good one. Walker & The All Stars, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and others. Is there any new music you would like to add? No. I haven’t stayed as plugged in, and I also get the feeling that we’re not in a red hot period in the pop music scene. I’d say Radiohead is my most recent addition, and that’s not very recent. My relationship with Jonny Greenwood has proved to be a very good one, and he’s played a great recording of “Electric Counterpoint. I have great regard for Paul McCartney. Marvelous sense of humor, marvelous musicianship, very admirable. Although I think his best songs are when he was with the Beatles. The perspectives expressed in Culture Current are the subject’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Reuters News. This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
In his latest composition, “In All Your Ways,” an 18-minute instrumental work that premiered in August at the Edinburgh International Festival ahead of his 90th birthday celebrations, on October 3, Reich explores new territory. How did it unfold with “In All Your Ways”? When I start any piece, and “In All Your Ways” was the same, I try to map out the harmonic structure. That goes back to when I wrote “Music For 18 Musicians” , and so in this case, I came up with all those in terms of key signatures: three sharps, one flat, five flats, and no sharps or flats. I wrote a good chunk of the piece, way more than half, and I said, “It’s fast. “In All Your Ways” originates from Proverbs 3:6. I wrote “Tehillim” in 1981. In the original proverb, it says “in all your ways know him, know God, and he will straighten your paths. But if you just take the first four words — “in all your ways” — at a musical level, it opens up more possibilities, it invites more possibilities to treat da di da dam da di da da. About a year before the music “In All Your Ways,” I just floundered around doing garbage — little sketches of it are in my music notebooks, which are all going to go off to my archive in Switzerland. “In All Your Ways,” the idea of inserting movements while I’m composing, I just never even remotely thought about doing it, and there was no need to do it. But on the other hand, I was able to do “Different Trains,” which I wouldn’t have been able to do the old .
