Composer Steve Reich’s Birthday
Triggers Global Celebration

Ask composer Steve Reich what genre he fits into, and he’ll affably but firmly resist classification. So leave the question to The Village Voice – which answers it by calling him “America’s greatest living composer.”

Reich is the thoughtful, socially aware talent behind such major works as the Grammy winning Different Trains (1988) and Music for 18 Musicians (1976) as well as Tehillim (1981), The Desert Music (1984) and the video opera Three Tales (2002). His embrace of technology dates back to his early work with tape loops and phase shifts in the 1960s on pieces like It’s Gonna Rain, Come Out and Piano Phase. Today, the technology he relies upon is Sibelius.

Throughout 2006, the music world will mark the composer’s 70th birthday with a series of celebrations, including a retrospective at the Barbican Centre in London and performances in Dublin, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Baden-Baden, Paris and Los Angeles. A three-venue retrospective in New York, “Reich@70”, will include a dance program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (opening on his actual birthday, October 3), a series of workshops and performances at Carnegie Hall, and a review of his vocal and dramatic works at Lincoln Center.

Even as they look back upon Reich’s career, the birthday observances will shed new light on his work. On October 28 at Lincoln Center, Grant Gershon will conduct the Los Angeles Master Chorale in the New York premiere of You Are (Variations) for voices and chamber ensemble. A week earlier, one of the Carnegie Hall programs will include the U.S. premiere of Daniel Variations – Reich’s tribute to The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl, who was murdered by Islamist fanatics in Pakistan in 2002.

“It turns out that Daniel Pearl was a fiddle player besides being a journalist,” says Reich, who met with the reporter’s father in the course of envisioning the piece. The result uses Pearl’s own words and excerpts from the Book of Daniel, accompanied by a 20-member ensemble.

Daniel Variations isn’t Reich’s first topical composition, but he says social commentary is never his chief motivator.

“The music comes first,” he says. “Prima la musica. If the music isn’t strong, the social issues aren’t worth two cents, because they’ll die very quickly with the music. Unless you’re U2 and Bono, you’re not going to have very much effect on the world at all. Did Guernica stop aerial bombing for one second?”

You Are (Variations) grew from a different process: Reich’s search for a project that would remove creative roadblocks to permit the emergence of something organic.

“I had just finished a cello piece that I’d had to work very hard on,” he says. “After that, I wanted to do a piece that I would just approach as a composer looking to enjoy himself using techniques that I knew and had used before – letting whatever happens happen without consciously seeking it out. And lo and behold, that’s what happened. It starts like Desert Music, then gets more rhythmically complex and chromatic.”

Reich first experimented with notation software as long ago as 1986, using what he describes now as “an absolute dog of a program.” One reason he made the jump from an all-pencil process was that his publishers at London-based Boosey & Hawkes told him they were “running out of people who want to tweak your scores when they come in.” Another, perhaps more compelling, was that the copyist’s bill for the many orchestral and choral charts of Desert Music had been larger than the commission Reich received for writing the piece in the first place.

It was some 15 years later, while writing Three Tales, that Reich turned from yet another program to Sibelius. He found immediately that it sped up his process without affecting his style.

“I’m a very slow composer,” he explains. “In contrast to the other programs that I’d tried, Sibelius never gets in the way. It’s always there, ready to go. I can be on a laptop in a plane with earbud headphones, composing and listening back right in the plane. This is enormously helpful.”

Reich still begins with pencil and paper, establishing the basic pitch structure, choral outlines and harmonic ground plan of a piece at the piano.

“Then I go over to the computer with the notebook and I start the real composing in Sibelius,” he says. “I enter all the pitches by mouse; I don’t play them in.”

Three Tales involved a great deal of audio sampling, ranging from naval klaxons to the famous Herb Morrison radio broadcast of the 1937 Hindenburg disaster. Reich used Sibelius to incorporate those sounds directly into the score, assigning them key locations on a separate staff.

“So Middle C on MIDI channel 16 is going to have a naval officer speaking,” he says, “and when I write Middle C, I’m going to get the voice, and I’ll get it right in sync with, say, a violin line.”

Sibelius also makes it easy for him to send tapes of his creations to conductors and players, which he says “gives them a tremendous leg up in rehearsals.” It wasn’t always that way.

“Somewhere there’s a tape of Tehillim and The Desert Music with me playing and singing everything,” he recalls. He even speeded up the tape to produce rehearsal tracks for the women’s parts, resulting in what he calls “the chipmunk tapes.”

With the music community making Reich’s 70th birthday into an international party, the spotlight will flare during the busy year ahead. But the composer keeps his own head squarely on his shoulders, often covered with a well worn baseball cap.