As previously announced, today marks the kickoff of a blog-based project we’re calling The Listening Room. It’s sort of a like a musical book club, and here’s how it works: over the next few months, we’ll announce specific recordings that Judd has chosen to feature, and we’ll provide a link to where you can go to download it or buy the CD… Then, on the designated discussion date, I’ll post an e-mail conversation between Judd and myself about the music on the featured album. With any luck, this post can spark a much broader discussion in the comments, and Judd and I will make a point of checking in regularly to respond to everything you all have to say.
The first album Judd chose to feature was this one, a Cantaloupe Records recording by Alarm Will Sound and the Ossia ensemble of Steve Reich’s Tehillim & The Desert Music. Tehillim is Reich’s 1981 setting of four Psalms. It’s considered one of Reich’s most important works, but also sounds quite distinct from much of his earlier work. The Desert Music is a choral setting from 1983 of several texts from the great American poet William Carlos Williams. For more background info on the album, check out my original Listening Room post, and you can click the album cover if you want to download the music and participate in the conversation.
I’m going to break our initial discussion of this album into two separate blog posts, for reasons of length and clarity. Today’s post covers Tehillim, and our discussion of The Desert Music will go up tomorrow morning. Enjoy, and don’t forget to offer your own opinions, reactions, and musical assessments in the comments!
Sam: Okay, so I think I know why you chose this album in particular. Tehillim is a setting of four Torah passages for women’s voices and an instrumental ensemble made up of some traditional classical instruments (clarinets, violins, etc.) and some distinctly 20th century electronic instruments. This is the type of ensemble you’ve written a lot of music for, and just this year, you premiered Sh’lomo, your own setting of passages from the Song of Solomon. Fair to say that Steve Reich has had a major influence on you as a composer?
Judd: This is like one of those “do you think America is a great country?” questions from Presidential debates. Yes, Sam, Steve Reich has indeed had a major influence on me as a composer. I’m glad you asked.
Actually, all the composers I’ve chosen for The Listening Room have had a huge influence. Reich, though, is the composer who’s far-and-away most often cited when people are drawing connections between my music and that which has come before. The Hebrew has something to do with it, but much more, it’s the interlocking rhythms and modal harmonies, with a great attention to big chord changes as well as small-scale harmonic and contrapuntal details, that connect my work to his. I do love all those elements of Reich’s music, and I carry them over into mine. Reich loves to establish a pattern and then move chords underneath it, with the pattern remaining entirely, or almost entirely, static. You’ll hear that maneuver a lot in my new piece for the Minnesota Orchestra — it’s actually one of the main “ideas” of the work. But when I think about that musical device, I think of it as coming, in part, from the hip hop that I listened to, and made, when I was growing up. How do you know when a hip hop beat is ready to go? When you want to leave it on loop, and never stop listening to it. Then it’s ready for things to move over it — in this case, the MC, rapping. I think of Reich’s repetitions in the same way. Even though there’s a certain pacing that’s optimal, in terms of when the harmonies or patterns shift, and even though the shifts themselves are usually the most magical moments of the pieces, there’s also a sense in which you don’t want the patterns to end, when they’re good. I strive for that in my music.
Of course, Steve Reich didn’t invent that idea. In fact, as he’d acknowledge, it was inspired by West African drumming that he played and studied. Go a step further and you can find specific texts that he studied, which contain transcriptions of drum patterns that form the basis for much of his work in the 1970s. Does this question remind anyone of anything? “Good composers borrow, great composers steal.” Given that nothing has ever really sounded like Steve Reich, it’s a great example of the good that comes when a brilliant composer blatantly steals from someone else, or in this case, another culture. I’m very, very glad that he had the guts to do that, because the “safe” version probably wouldn’t have created the opening for his own distinct voice to emerge.
For me, I don’t know if I point back to Reich as directly as people think, but I definitely count him as a huge influence, and he’s one of the composers that I listen to regularly. That’s a short list.
Sam: Tehillim, which was written in 1981, was actually quite a departure from what Reich had been doing in the 1970s. It’s far less radical than most of his work, and dare I say, a little more classical? But Reich also wrote in the liner notes for the original recording that “the overall sound of Tehillim, and in particular, the intricately interlocking percussion writing which, together with the text, marks this music as unique by introducing a basic musical element that one does not find in earlier Western musical practice including the music of this century. Tehillim may thus be heard as traditional and new at the same time.” I confess that I didn’t hear it that way on this recording – the percussion seemed to blend very naturally with the almost Renaissance sound of some of the vocal lines. When you listen to the piece, do you hear all the disparate elements Reich talked about, or do you hear it the way I do, as a consonant whole?
Judd: This idea of “radicalism” is something that I really detest, because it always means looking at music from this extremely linear, highly shortsighted perspective. Human beings have been around for a long time and will continue to be here for a while yet, and our view of art is confined to this tiny little period of music history where we evaluate everything basically in terms of whether it moves toward or away from Beethoven (think about it). Tehillim is “radical” in Reich’s output, which to me is more important than whether it (here we go) Breaks New Ground In Contemporary Composition. Plenty of pieces that do the latter have been totally forgotten, because the Ground that they Broke was really uninteresting, and turned out to be more about where people happened to be at that time, than about where they’d be in just a few years. What’s unique about a work comes entirely from its status as a reflection of an individual artist’s uniqueness as a person, with his or her particular influences and ways of looking at the world. It grosses me out to read Reich’s own words on the topic, which are so incredibly and obviously defensive. It’s like, “no no, look, here’s why this isn’t as square as you think it is!” and I’m like, hey, Steve Reich, you just wrote TEHILLIM, it’s a masterwork, you’ll be fine. I think when he’s talking about the percussion writing, he’s tying it to works like Drumming, which introduces the African rhythmic practice; that interlocking quality is certainly present, wouldn’t you agree, Sam?
Sam: Yeah, definitely. And what you said about the quality of the work being more important than whether or not it breaks new ground is one of my favorite discussion topics. Is Mendelssohn’s music any less exhilarating because he didn’t “change the game” the way Stravinsky or Haydn did? Not in my book. And you’re definitely right that Tehillim gets counted among Reich’s greatest works today.
Judd: For me, [the pieces on this album] are Reich’s two greatest works. What’s remarkable about them is precisely that, like others in this late-70s/early-80s period in his career, they blow open the rigidity of his earlier work, which were built on the idea that discernible “process” had to be paramount over other formal concerns. What this means is that the musical elements in a given work tend to remain static, and when they change, the changes happen in only one or two elements at a time, and the changes are highly discernible. You’ll hear a note added to a pattern, and then that new pattern will repeat a lot until you get to know it, and then something else will get faster, and you’ll hear that until you’re familiar with it, and so on. What’s amazing about Reich’s seminal work Music for 18 Musicians is that even with these constraints, of highly-discernible, extremely transparent “process-oriented” music, he creates a large-scale form that’s rich and complex and not as linear as most process pieces tend to be (for obvious reasons). Tehillim and especially The Desert Music take this to an entirely different level, where the process elements are subservient to the larger form — at least to my ears (I don’t know how he constructed the works). The musical form feels highly intentional, and built from the top down, not the bottom up.
One interesting thing to note here is that a number of “minimalist” composers made this shift, as they moved into the late 1970s and 1980s — Philip Glass, John Adams, and others all started writing bigger Symphonic works that placed less emphasis on transparency than the works of the early/mid-1970s, and certainly, then those of the 1960s. I’m not sure what was in the air, but that coming-together was a really wonderful time for music, and some of my favorite scores emerged from the period, including these two.
Tomorrow: Judd and I tackle The Desert Music. Check back then, and don’t forget to join the conversation in the comments. The Listening Room stays open for as long as you guys feel like hanging around…
This was a lot of fun to wake up to. Better than coffee.
I might have more to say later, but I do want to thank you for what you’re both saying about linear progression in music, and classical music’s obsession with it. I’ve loved music history for as long as I can remember, and so like a good little girl I went to the library and searched for Lives of the Great Composers books as soon as I was old enough to read them. The main book on the topic was Harold Schonberg’s, and since, according to the jacket, he had written for The New York Times, his words were gospel to this Internet-less Midwestern ten-year-old. I still remember the sense of profound disappointment I felt when I opened the book up and read in the introduction that (basically) modern music sucks, serialism ruined it for everybody for all time’s sake, and minimalism is “baby music.” I’d never heard any serialism or minimalism, but if the author of The Lives of the Great Composers said it sucked, then it must suck. Clearly that hitherto uninterrupted chain of greatness from Monteverdi had been severed sometime in my mother’s early childhood, and now there was nothing new that was also worthwhile, and there never would be again. (Stupid composers.) Michael Steen’s book was even more pessimistic; it insinuates in the introduction that music ended “when key broke down” (although, to be fair, he then says he didn’t cover the twentieth century because he felt he couldn’t do it justice in the space he was allocated, but one does get the sense that he’s relieved he didn’t need to take it on). So now apparently the chain of greatness had been severed sometime in my *great-grandmother’s* early childhood. Thanks a lot, Edwardian composers.
And then came The Rest Is Noise, thank God, and the idea that you’re talking about, that classical music (especially in this century, and the last century) isn’t all about breaking new ground, moving toward some kind of future musical utopia, or even necessarily being part of the progression from Beethoven. That really freed something up for me, since I’m a listener who spent literally her whole childhood listening to classical instrumental music pre-1940 and absolutely nothing else, and as Schoenberg and Steen insinuate, there is definitely this narrative that classical musicians have built up around ourselves, that Haydn led to Beethoven and Beethoven to Berlioz and Berlioz to Wagner, or whatever, and in order to be part of the “classical” genre, composers have to build off that 400-year-old historical chain, or they aren’t “classical” anymore, and “classical fans” then miss out on them. Ideas like the ones you’re talking about – that we don’t need to insist on the Beethoven progression, that it’s ludicrous to dismiss the music of an entire era based on the ideas of a few composers, that it’s even more ludicrous to say that our music has ended, period, based on the ideas of a few composers – they help to remove some of the pollution and bias from my brain, so I can come at new music from a new angle and just appreciate pieces for what they are, and not burden them with the task of being linear responses to the great composers of the past. And consequently, I can enjoy them, and gasp, even love them. I just wish music writers had taken this more open approach sooner; I’m not quite sure why they didn’t…? Why this obsession with a neat order of succession (or even classification)? I can’t have been the only one who was needlessly pushed away from contemporary music by various writers’ demeaning words before I’d even heard a bar of it. (Then again, I don’t know how many people have their initial impressions of new music made by “Lives and Times of the Great Composers” books. Especially nowadays with the Internet. But back in the day…we had to go to the library to get our information on music history. And we had to walk uphill both ways to get there.)
Um, so anyway. That was long *and* veering on irrelevant. Sorry. Somebody else bring this back to Reich…
The Listening Room is a great idea and a terrific complement to the fabulous ITC series. Now that that’s out of the way…
I’m relatively new to classical music, and to modern composers and Steve Reich as well, so my comments are fairly uninformed in that respect. I think your observations about the form of the compositions above are really interesting and I’ll need to listen to the pieces a couple more times to really incorporate them. I also liked the idea of the “transparency” of transitions and changes to patterns and will need to think about that some more…
I liked the contrast between the canon and unison movements quite a bit. While the canon sections became confusing at times for me, the unison (is that the right nomenclature?) sections seemed kind of spare and simplistic in comparison. Neither was better or worse really, but each cast a different shadow on the other.
You mentioned above the link to drumming styles. However, I also thought that there was a strong link to chanting styles (moreso in Tehillim), as well as to psychedelic pop (moreso in Desert Music). Strangely, I was also reminded strongly of soundtracks to movies of the early- to mid-seventies, particularly with respect to the dissonant intervals used throughout. (Is “dissonant” the right word here, or is that what you meant by “modal harmonies”? I betray my lack of music theory education…)
I’m not a fan, generally speaking, of choral or “formal” vocals. Choirs are one thing, because you get the effect of the massively blended sounds. With small sets of voices however you have to rely on the individual qualities of the voices, and I found them a little strident for my ear. But that may have been due to the engineering and mixing of the recording as well. I did find the vocals to be overpowering in the mix, and not given the benefit of much stereo separation either.
Overall I found it very stimulating to listen to. I’ll be curious to read what others thought about it as well
Thanks!
I first heard Tehillim live several years ago when Marin Alsop and the Colorado Symphony celebrated Reich’s birthday with a complete concert of his work. I immediately found the CD and it has been in my changer the vast majority of the time since then. This is a great start for your blog!
“Music for 18 Musicians” is almost always cited as Reich’s masterpiece, and it is hard to argue against it. But for me, “Tehillim” is his greatest work and desert island music for me.
I first heard it after finding a used CD during my undergraduate years. I was familiar with some Reich, had played some Reich in fact, but had not heard any through-composed pieces. I was very excited by it and mentioned it to my percussion teacher who, as it turned out, played the west coast premier. She recalled that when the parts were assigned the percussionists were shocked that their best player got the maraca part. All the parts are challenging, but to play endless, perfectly even sixteenth notes through changing meters on maracas is really, really, really hard. She also remembered that if things weren’t going great, rehearsal letter R was your chance to get back on.
Prior to “Tehillim,” Reich pretty much used voices as though they were instruments, sans words. And despite the fact that Reich has since written some excellent choral music, “Tehillim” pretty much stands alone (and is perhaps all the more remarkable for it). The voices sing without vibrato, very much in a baroque style, that is accessible for listeners who may not be opera aficionados. In fact, I lent a recording of “Tehillim” to a friend with an encyclopedic knowledge of baroque music, who listens to practically nothing composed after 1750, and he loved “Tehillim.”
Of the four recordings I am aware of, I must recommend the ECM recording with Steve Reich and Musicians. Unfortunately, it comes shorn of any accompanying works.
Emily — I spend way too much of my life talking about music history so I’m going to leave that alone (for now)!
Jeff — ”dissonant” is one of the more loaded and subjective terms in music history. The interval of a third was considered dissonant for hundreds of years. The term tends to take on meaning only when you have a system in place with defined meanings for each chord (AKA “functional harmony”). I’m sure someone could make a case for a system being in place here, or in Reich’s music in general, but it’s definitely not cut and dry.
As with Sam’s comment about feeling a little let down in the middle movements, I feel like 30 minutes of endless canons would be potentially draining, and would diminish the effect of those that were included. The sections you call “unison” work better, I think, in live performance than on recording (though they don’t bother me as much as they seem to bother others). You should all push to get these works to Minnesota!
You’re right of course about how loaded the word “dissonance” is, and I recall reading about the third being considered dissonant. I suppose it is like so many things where your cultural and personal experience come into play… And now I’m going to have to look up “functional harmony”
On a different track: do modern composers typically work with MIDI or other techniques that let them actually hear a composition without the need/expense of actual musicians? I know the limitations of MIDI, but I find it difficult to imagine holding those interleaving rhythms all in your head during the process of composing, much less the overall feel and tone of a 20 to 30 minute piece…
Judd wrote: “As with Sam’s comment about feeling a little let down in the middle movements…”
Oh, I actually cut that part of our conversation out of the post, just because it was already pretty long. But I did say in our e-mail correspondence that Reich “loses me a few times in the interior movements, when certain patterns seem to loop endlessly without advancing the music as much as I’d like.”
Since Judd brought it up, I’ll print his reply here:
Go listen to Beethoven 4; it’s a really static work that explodes at the end. Some pieces are like that; not everything can be a perpetual World of Wonders, like The Rite of Spring or Beethoven 9 or the Ravel Piano Trio or so many other works that just keep unfolding to reveal new, amazing delights. You’re really talking about the third movement, right? When you hear this work live, your brain needs a little bit of a break; the pace of information needs to slow down a little. I also see it as serving to setup the fourth movement, which is one of the most glorious things ever written, so if that’s what it takes….
Fair point. And Beethoven 4 might be my favorite of his symphonies for exactly that reason. I’ll give the interior movements another shot with that in mind.