This is the second of two posts kicking off the musical conversation we’re calling The Listening Room. If this is the first you’ve heard of it, click here to get caught up. Yesterday, Judd and I discussed the first work on this month’s featured album, Steve Reich’s 1981 masterpiece, Tehillim. Today’s post covers the other work on the album, Reich’s setting of poems by William Carlos Williams, titled The Desert Music. Add your own thoughts in the comments, and we’ll keep the conversation going for as long as there’s interest…

Sam: The Desert Music is also scored for voices and small orchestra, but it couldn’t be more different from Tehillim. Talk a little bit about Reich’s use of “phasing,” a technique he devised in which the same rhythmic or melodic figure is played by multiple musicians ever so slightly out of sync with each other.

Judd: Phasing is simple — take two recordings, and start them at the same time. Then speed one up slightly so that it begins to sound weirdly chorused/distorted, then gradually becomes discernible as an echo of the other. That’s phasing. Where it gets particularly interesting is where you phase musical elements that are able to take on different meanings when they are shifted in terms of their rhythmic relationship. If you take two recordings of Row Row Row Your Boat, and phase them, stopping the speeding-up each time the rhythms line up again, you’ll get a nice effect because Row Row Row Your Boat is a round, meaning that the harmonies line up with each other at regular intervals in the song. If you do the same thing with The Rite of Spring it might be interesting, but it’ll be cacophonously so.

What Reich winds up doing is doing this live, with different players playing the same instrument (type), so that you get this crazy mental effect of not being sure what is producing the sound. Your brain can also parse the melodic fragments he’s using quite easily, and you get very familiar with them, so it’s a way of having things remain the same, and familiar, while also changing.

In The Desert Music he doesn’t do the kind of gradual phasing that you hear in earlier works, but the interlocking patterns will often change in relation to one another in ways that come out of the earlier phase works.

Sam: The texts for The Desert Music are from poems by William Carlos Williams, who seems to be a very popular muse for composers. What do you think it is about his poetry that speaks to composers of our era?

Judd: He’s just an incredible poet. And he writes in a way that preserves the cadence of speech, which, for a certain type of composer, is very useful. The centerpiece of The Desert Music is the section taken from “The Orchestra”, with this famous passage:

Say to them: Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them or perish.

That poem is really remarkable, and it’s equally remarkable that Reich, when commissioned by the Brooklyn Philharmonic to write a quasi-orchestral work, immediately went to a poem that seems to draw a parallel between the way an orchestra works together, and works with an audience, to the way that human society works together. (side note: I’ve never seen anyone mention this, but Williams was almost surely quoting Bertrand Russell there, from the end of an essay he wrote for the Guardian in 1952, two years before The Desert Music and Other Poems was published. It’s an incredible tribute, the Moses-like command to “say to them”, with Russell as the holy prophet. I don’t know if Reich was aware of that allusion when he set the poem but it makes everything even more interconnected.)

Sam: Reich gives very specific tempo instructions for each movement of The Desert Music, and I’ve even read that the different movements have tempo relationships, a specific number of beats per minute that line up in a 3:2 ratio. Obviously, rhythm and tempo are critical elements of Reich’s music, but honestly, would it really make any difference to the listener if a performance of this piece didn’t follow Reich’s exact tempos?

Judd: Music lives in the body. Would it make a difference if two notes were out of tune? The answer is yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Sometimes things being out of tune, or of different timbres and with different overtones, can be a good thing. I think you can feel when tempo relationships exist across different spaces of music — you at least feel the relative shift, if not the strict relationships — but it could well be that things move better when certain sections are a little faster or slower than Reich intended. I have to make enough of these decisions in my own music; I’m not going to try to pick apart Reich’s masterworks that way.

Sam: Fair enough. Let’s shift gears a bit – we haven’t talked much about the singing on this album yet. The vocal lines in both pieces are performed entirely without vibrato, which is a very unique sound, and one we seem to be hearing more and more of today. Is this just a stylistic preference, is it related to the rise of amplified performance, or is there a deeper reason that many composers are moving away from traditional operatic styles of singing?

Judd: Actually, you know what’s really a unique sound? Western operatic singing! It’s totally crazy that this is the basis for what’s expected in contemporary music practice, but again, you only know where you’re coming from, not where things are going.

Straight-tone singing makes a lot of sense in this vocal writing, which isn’t about the small inflections that might happen in a typical operatic aria, but is either about quickly-moving repeated notes (at the beginning and the end of the piece), or about long tones, held over moving lines. The former would be impossible with vibrato and the latter would be tricky. Plus, the vocal lines would have a hard time blending with the clarinets, vibes, and harmonics. The vocals are themselves also usually blending into a big chord that is held for a while, and not only does that sound really outstandingly amazing in straight-tone singing, but it might sound strange with vibrato.

That said, I don’t know that it would necessarily be “bad” to sing with more vibrato here, it just would certainly be against Reich’s intent.

One really cool thing about this recording is how the instrumental players really attack the lines at times — it’s not meant to be this cold, neutral, austere presentation. Listen to the last movement of The Desert Music, it’s like this orgy of wild violin lines, big crescendi, and even these awesome vocal slides that are very “pop” and totally wonderful when they occasionally happen.

This would probably be a good time to note that this recording is really, really good. I have a close personal relationship with the premiere recordings of both these pieces (I still remember hearing the end of The Desert Music on WNYC one night when I was home from college, the precise moment that I became a Steve Reich fan), but this recording is so meticulous and really elevates the pieces to new heights.

Sam: One of the hardest things for listeners who shy away from “new music” tends to be the lack of traditional Germanic melodic forms, and I never know quite what to say when someone claims that a work by a living composer has “no melody.” I hear melodic fragments all over Reich’s work, but it’s true that it’s very different from listening to something written in sonata form. I enjoy Beethoven, and I enjoy Reich, but I almost feel like I have to enjoy them with different parts of my brain. Is that true for you as well?

Judd: I think part of what’s happening here is that, to a lot of people, “melody” means “diatonic melody”. [ALERT: THIS WILL BE NERDY AND MAY MAKE NO SENSE.] There’s a really big difference between even triadic, relatively “consonant” harmonic writing, such as Reich’s or mine, that never (Reich) or rarely (Greenstein) uses tonic-dominant relationships — which, without getting into it, is the backbone of Western harmony from around 1500 to 1910.

Reich and I both move around much more by seconds and thirds — necessary when you’re holding a bunch of common notes in a pattern — and this means that there are going to be different kinds of melodies that emerge. My melodic writing, to my own ear, feels derived almost from plainchant. But all modal music has something of that quality — look at, say, Mongo Santamaria’s Afro Blue, made famous by John Coltrane. You could convincingly use that as an isorhythm in a motet, right? Maybe? Am I stretching things? It’s close, in any case.

But none of this has much to do with the kind of melodic writing that you get when there’s a big V-I move articulating the harmonic change. (Ed. note: V-I is the notation for music moving from a dominant chord back to the main tonic chord. More simply, it’s what your average, uncomplicated ending sounds like in everything from Tchaikovsky symphonies to pop songs.) It’s not better or worse, it’s just a different feeling. But the chord changes that happen in Reich are some of my favorites ever, and I have stolen them completely and thoroughly in my own writing.

So there’s Judd’s take on this remarkable CD from Alarm Will Sound and Ossia. What’s yours? Chime in down in the comments, and join us in January for the next installment of The Listening Room…

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 20^th 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…