Contemporary Music Review

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My life with technology

Steve Reich

To cite this article: Steve Reich (1996) My life with technology, Contemporary Music Review, 13:2,
13-21, DOI: 10.1080/07494469600640031

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Contemporary Music Review, 9 1990 Steve Reich
1996, Vol. 13, Part 2, pp. 13-21 Printed in Malaysia
Reprints available directly from the publisher
Photocopying permitted by license only

My Life with Technology

Steve Reich

This article explores the experiences that I have had with technology that deals with sound. I will
describe my use of sound technology in several works, and the impact on my musical development.

KEYWORDS Music Composition, Music Technology

This article explores the experiences that I have had with technology that deals
with sound. I will begin with m y experiences with sound technology as a child.
Since I was born in 1936, that means radio and records.

1936-1960

Radio

The radio shows that I grew with - adventures, mysteries, music and comedy -
obviously all involved listening only. The visual counterpart, if there was to be
any, had to be imagined. I don't remember having elaborate visual images accom-
panying the radio shows that I listened to. I just listened, and that was enough.
By the time we had a TV set in our house I was going into high school and I had
little time for television. This probably doesn't explain the fact that I don't have
images in m y mind when listening to music to this da3~ but at least it fills in the
general picture. It may explain the fact that while I have enjoyed listening to
recordings of Stravinsky's The Rake'sof Progress(incidentally, the only Grand Opera
that I enjoy), I have no desire to see it staged. Listening to it supplies all of the
drama I need.

Records

I am a member of the first, but certainly not the last, generation of composers
growing up with more exposure to recordings than to live music. Although I
practiced piano and occasionally went to concerts and Broadway musicals as a
child, I undoubtedly heard more actual hours of music from recordings. We had
78 rpm recordings of the "middle class favorites' - Beethoven's Fifth Symphony,
Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, Wagner's Overture to Die Meistersinger and arias
sung by Caruso. Later I was exposed to Gershwin, Rogers and Hammerstein and
some Gilbert and Sullivan. However, at the age of 14, after LPs had been around

13
14 SteveReich

a while, I heard several recordings which had a profound effect on me -

Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #5, and several LPs of
Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Kenny Clarke. These recordings convinced me
to study trap drums so that a friend and I could form a jazz group. This further
convinced me that I wanted to listen to more twentieth century music on one
hand, and more music from 1750 and earlier on the other. This interest irt n e w and
old music that shared a strong rhythmic pulse and a relatively clear tonal center
has stayed with me. The real point is that these recordings put the sound of
amplified instruments and voices in m y ear. What I was hearing was not only
sound coming from instruments, but electronically-controlled sound also coming
from loudspeakers - sound whose volume could be carefully adjusted, whose
high and low frequencies could be independently boosted or attenuated.
My interest in jazz soon led me to jazz clubs like Birdland, where, even in the
1950s, the microphone became part of the performance. It brought out the detail
in the bass solo; it let a piano or singer be heard over the drums; and later, in the
hands of Miles Davis, it radically changed the timbre of a muted trumpet or flugel
horn.
In the background of m y life in the 1950s was rock and roll. I heard it on the
radio while trying to find a jazz station or in a movie and so on. I sometimes
enjoyed the sound of the amplified instruments, but the 1950s rock and roll
musicians like Elvis Presley or Fats Domino have never interested me.
By 19571 had completed m y studies at Cornell University, and for a year I stud-
ied composition privately with composer and a jazz musician Hall Overton in
N e w York City. In 19581 entered Julliard School where I remained until 1961. Like
all other music schools there was a record library together with the score library.
Listening to records while following scores became an almost daily activity.
While in m y last year at Julliard I heard John Coltrane playing what was then
called "Modal Jazz', which could also be described as music that used one or two
harmonies for up to a half an hour. The microphone remained omnipresent and
my collection of records had grown. Listening to records still filled many hours
of every week even in this period of m y life, with hours spent in live music making,
rehearsing or listening.

The tape recorder

Sometime around 1959 1 bought m y first tape recorder. It was a Wollensak mono
machine, a garden variety model for home use in those days. I used it to record
myself or others playing m y pieces. I also occasionally recorded jam sessions during
which I played trap drums. I was not yet aware h o w important tape recording
w o u l d become in m y musical life during the next few years.

1961-1966

Tape and underground films

In 1961 I left N e w York City for San Francisco, where ! did m y graduate studies
ir~,composition at Mills College in Oakland. Most of m y studies at Mills.College
 My Lifewith Technology 15
were with Luciano Berio, who was at that time very active in electronic music,
particularly with tape music using speech as a sound source. Two works which
come to mind are Omaggio a Joyce and Visage. I found these compositions, along
with Stockhausen's Gesang der JungIinger, to be the first electronic music I had
heard of real interest. It occurred to me that speech was the answer to the ques-
tion of h o w to make emotionally involving electronic music. Previous to this I
had found oscillator-generated electronic music to be of no interest. It struck me
that the tape recorder was best used to record real sound, particularly speech, just
as a movie camera records real moving images. To present this real material in a
recognizable way, as opposed to altering and disguising it, as in the Musique
Concrete of the time, seemed to me to be the key to keeping the emotional thrust
of the original speech or real sound intact. At this same time I began taking a real
interest in the 'Underground' films of the 1960s. The analogy of film and tape as
both recording media whose temporal ordering was then later manipulated via
editing struck me as significant.
I graduated from Mills College in 1963 and decided that I would not seek
employment in the academic community, since I felt that for me as a composer
this would be counterproductive. To support myself I took a job as a driver with
the Yellow Cab Company in San Francisco. Besides writing the music for several
San Francisco Mime Troupe productions, I also put a portable tape recorder in-
side the taxi I was driving, with the intention of making a collage o f speech frag-
ments, door slams, meter throws and so on. This piece was completed in 1964
and, though later withdrawn, it proved to be a crash course in tape editing, open-
ing a door into new ways of making music.

It's Gonna Rain & Come O u t

Late in 1964 in Union Square in San Francisco I recorded a black preacher, Brother
Walter, preaching about the Flood. I was extremely impressed with the melodic
quality of his speech which seemed to be on the verge of singing. Early in 1965
I began making tape loops of his voice which made the musical quality of his
speech emerge even more strongly.
The idea of using constant repetition grew out of a number of sources including
working with tape loops since 1963; listening to African music and, more impor-
tantly, seeing transcriptions of it by the English Ethnomusicologist A. M. Jones;
and helping Terry Riley put together the first performance, in 1964, of his compo-
sition In C, where many different repeating patterns were combined simultane-
ously. My problem was then to find a new way of working with repetition as a
musical technique. My first thought was to play one loop against itself in some
particular canonic relationship, since some of m y previous pieces had dealt with
two or more identical instruments playing the same notes against each other. In
the process of trying to line up two identical tape loops in a particular relation-
ship, I discovered that the most interesting music of all was made by simply lin-
ing the loops up in unison and then letting them slowly shift out of phase with
each other. As I listened to this gradual phase shifting process I began to realize
that it was an extraordinary form of musical structure. This process struck me as
a w a y of going through a number of relationships between two identities without
ever having any transitions. It was a seamless, continuous, uninterrupted musi-
cal process.
 16 SteveReich

In retrospect I understand the process of gradually shifting phase relations

between two or more identical repeating musical patterns as an extension of the
idea of infinite canon or round. Two or more identical melodies are played with
one starting after the other, as in traditional rounds, but in the phase shifting process
the melodies are usually much shorter repeating patterns, and the time interval
between one melodic pattern and its imitations, instead of being fixed, is variable.
The first part of the tape piece It's Gonna Rain, completed in January 1965, is a
literal embodiment of this process. Two loops are lined up in unison and then
gradually move completely out of phase with each other, and then back into unison.
In the second part two much longer loops gradually begin to go out of phase with
each other. This two-voice relationship is then doubled to four, and finally to eight.
The effect is that of a controlled chaos which is appropriate to the subject matter
- the end of the world.
It's Gonna Rain is the first piece to ever use the process of graduatly shifting
phase relations between two or more identical repeating patterns. The second
piece is Come Out. After moving back to New York City in the fall of 1965, Come
Out was composed as part of a benefit presented at Town Hall in New York for
the re-trial, with lawyers of their own choosing, of the six boys arrested for mur-
der during the Harlem riots of 1964. The voice is that of Daniel Hamm, now
acquitted and then 19 years old, describing a beating he took in Harlem's 28th
Precinct police station. The police were about to take the boys out to be 'cleaned
up' and were only taking those that were visibly bleeding. Since H a m m had no
actual open bleeding he proceeded to squeeze open a bruise on his leg so that he
would be taken to the hospital. "I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of
the bruise blood come out to show them."
Come Out is composed of a single loop recorded on both channels. First the loop
is in unison with itself. As it begins to go out of phase a slowly increasing rever-
beration is heard. This gradually passes into a canon for two voices, then four
voices and finally eight.
By using recorded speech as musical source material, speech-melody and
meaning are presented as they naturally occur. By not altering its pitch or timbre,
one keeps the original emotional power that speech has while intensifying its
melody and meaning through repetition and rhythm.

1967-1970

Piano Phase

Shortly after completing Come Out I began to think about writing live instrumen-
tal music. Unfortunatel3~ it seemed impossible to me at the time for two human
beings to perform that gradual phase-shifting process, since the process was dis-
covered with and seemed indigenous to, tape recorders. Oit the other hand I could
think of nothing else to do with live musicians that would be as interesting as the
phasing process. Finally, late in 1966, I recorded a short repeating pattern pla};ed
on the piano, made a loop of it and then tried to play against that loop myself,
exactly as if I were a second tape recorder. To m y surprise, I found that while I
lacked the perfection of the machine, I could give a good approximation of it
while enjoying a whole new and extremely satisfying w a y of playing that was
 My Life with Technology 17

both completely worked out beforehand and yet free of reading notation, allow-
ing me to become completely absorbed in listening while I played.
Later I found that I could play this piece, Piano Phase, with another musician
without any tape. We began in unison playing the same pattern over and over
again. While one of us stayed put, the other gradually increased his tempo so as
to slowly move one sixteenth note ahead. This was continued until we were back
in unison at which point the pattern changed, getting shorter, and the process
began again. To play the piece we had to listen carefully in order to hear if we'd
moved one beat ahead, or two by mistake, or whether we'd drifted back to where
we started. We would both listen closely and try to perform the musical process
over and over again until we could do it well. Everything was worked out, and
there was no improvisation. But the psychology of performance, what really
happened when we played, was total involvement with the sound - total sensu-
ous involvement.
Now, what we have here is a situation where a piece of live instrumental music
is composed by imitating a process that was discovered with tape recorders. The
phasing process does not exist in any Western or non-Western music to m y knowl-
edge. It can however be found in railroad crossing bells, in windshield wipers on
a bus and in independently running tape loops. This is an instance where elec-
tronic musical procedures suggest instrumental ones. It seemed to me at the time,
as it still seems to me, that if the ideas I discovered with tape loops could not be
transferred in some way to musical instruments, then those ideas would be noth-
ing more than a gimmick. What gives them musical solidity was that they could
be transferred to instrumental music. This kind of cross fertilization from elec-
tronics to musical instruments was to continue in m y life, and it didn't take very
long.

The Phase Shifting Pulse Gate - Four Organs; an end to electronics

I write about the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate in m y article "The Phase Shifting Pulse
Gate - Four Organs; an end to Electronics" from m y book Writings About Music. 1
Despite the fact that the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate was ultimately a failure as an
instrument, once again an idea from electronics generated what in musical terms
is called augmentation - the increase in duration of a musical note, interval or
chord. Traditionally in Western music augmentation has dealt with making a given
duration longer in simple ratios of say 2:1, 3:1 or 4:1. Since the pulse width capaci-
tors made it possible to gradually increase the duration of a given note, this sug-
gested a piece in which notes would gradually increase in duration and keep on
doing so to enormous proportions until a kind of slow motion music was arrived
at. The idea of slow motion of course comes originally from films, not from music.

Reich, S. (1974) "The Phase Shifting Pulse Gate - Four Organs, an end to Electronics". In Writings
About Music, S. Reich. N e w
York: Columbia University and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
18 SteveReich

1971-1986

Drumming, Music for 18 Musicians, Tehillim, t h e Counterpoint Series,

The Desert Music, the Macintosh

Four Organs and Phase Patterns, both for four electric organs, were pieces that m y
ensemble took on tours of the United States and Europe frequently in the 1970s.
The experience of touring with four electric organs proved difficult, since one or
more organs might not function after transport, and a fifth was added as a spare.
Much time was spent making patch connections and so on, in contrast to the more
easily performed acoustical works on our programs. As works like Drumming
were added to our repertoire the contrast became more and more pronounced
between the rich sound and physical reliability of drums, marimbas and glocken-
spiels as opposed to the harsher sound and physical unreliability of electric or-
gans. By the time I was composing Music for 18 Musicians (1974 to 1976), I con-
sciously avoided using electric keyboard instruments. Beyond the practical an-
noyance of touring with unreliable instruments lay a growing awareness that the
oscillators in an electric organ or synthesizer were just as poverty stricken acous-
tically as the oscillators in earlier electronic music had been. For example, if you
play an 'A' on a synthesizer and direct the output into a scope, y o u will see a fixed
wave form, or more recently y o u m a y see a random variation built in. If you play
the same note on a violin and direct that sound into a scope via a microphone,
you see all kinds of microvariation in what to the ear sounds like a 'perfectly even
A'. These microvariations are just what our ears crave when we listen to live music,
and its absence can produce that feeling of deadliness that synthesizers have. For
this reason, together with the practical annoyance of traveling with fragile elec-
tronics, I avoided using any electronics whatsoever in my music during the pe-
riod 1974 to 1980, with the one exception being microphones.
The microphone has become so omnipresent in our lives that we hardly notice
it. It became a commonplace component of popular music and jazz back in the
1940s. For me it became crucial in several ways. For one thing, it made particular
balances possible between instruments that w o u l d otherwise not be possible. In
Music for 18 Musicians, for instance, the bass clarinet's low growling can be heard
cutting through the entire ensemble because it is closely miked. It is the same
with the light solo women's voices in Tehillim. In fact, m y basic premise about
using voices with instruments is that I want a light non-vibrato voice, amplified
so that it will maintain its lightness and agilit~ and still be easily heard. This m a y
partly explain w h y I detest the big bel canto or Wagnerian voice which was in-
vented to be heard over an entire orchestra without the benefit of a microphone.
The microphone further amplifies details of sound and gives it a sheen or luster,
if used judiciously. We live in a world where one hears much amplified music,
and on the concert stage a small number of players can sound thin in a large hall.
Chamber music was not originally intended for a 1000 to 2500 seat hall.
This kind of thinking about technology - namely to avoid it with the exception
of the microphone - continued through 1979, with the exception of the use of
synthesizers in my orchestral piece Variations, where they were used to help fill
 My Life with Technology 19

out the brass. In 1980 1 began having thoughts about returning to tape so that I
could once again use the recorded speaking voice as a source for musical compo-
sition. I visited IRCAM in Paris in the spring of 1980, where I slowed d o w n sev-
eral speech recordings to enormous length without changing their pitch using
computers. However, I could not think of any w a y of using the taped material in
a piece at that time. Vague ideas about using documentary historical audio and
even video material from the World War II period went through m y mind, but
with no real effect.
In 1981 Tehillim was completed, and in 1982 1 began work on a n e w piece for
flute and tape that was to begin a series of pieces for solo instrument and tape.
The compositions Vermont Counterpoint (1982) for flutist Ransom Wilson, New York
Counterpoint (1985) for clarinetist Richard Stoltzman and Electric Counterpoint (1987)
for guitarist Pat Metheny all deal with the problem of writing a piece for a soloist
by multiplying that soloist into an ensemble of identical instruments, very much
as Violin Phase had done for solo violin and tape back in 1967. The differences in
the recent pieces can be easily heard. Melodic patterns are longer, harmony changes
more rapidl~ and different tempos are used to set off one movement from an-
other.
In 1983 I was asked by the West Deutscher Rundfunk in Cologne and the
Brooklyn Academy of Music to compose a major work for chorus and orchestra.
Once again thoughts about audio and video taped materials from the World War
II period came to mind. Then I began re-reading m y favorite American poet William
Carlos Williams. Since Williams wrote plainly yet eloquently about the bomb and
our present social condition, I decided to fulfill a life long ambition to set his
poetry to music. The result, in 1984, was The Desert Music for chorus and orches-
tra. Once again microphones were used for the chorus and woodwinds, and syn-
thesizers had a minor role filling out the brass texture.
In Sextet, composed in 1985, microphones were used for the 2 pianos, the 3
marimbas and especially for the two vibraphones that were often b o w e d and yet
had to be heard clearly over the entire ensemble. Two synthesizers actually had
a melodic role to play in one movement. By this time m y ensemble traveled with-
out our own equipment and relied on sponsors to supply the synthesizers as well
as percussion instruments.
In 1986, to m y surprise, I became interested in computers. It started with buy-
ing an Apple IIC for m y eight year old son whose friends had the same machine.
This soon led to m y looking into the possibilities of computer-generated music
notation, which in turn led to my buying a Macintosh Plus so I could use the
Professional Composer notation program and later the Performer sequencer soft-
ware as well. I found both programs to be a tremendous practical help, especially
in preparing parts, since these are extracted automatically from the score. With
the addition of music fonts and printout on a laser printer, the notation is n o w
camera ready for publication, with a little hand finishing from m y copyist. The
computer is not only a time saving device, but it is also a great economic help
since copying costs, as most composers know, can easily consume most or all of
a commission fee. I would be quite surprised if, in less than five years, most young
composers were not generating their scores via computer.
20 SteveReich

1987 -

Different Trains and the Documentary Music Video Theater

of the Future
I completed a n e w piece for the Kronos string quartet and tape, entitled Different
Trains. The idea for this piece comes from m y childhood. From the age of two my
parents were separated, with m y father living in N e w York and my mother in Los
Angeles. I used to take train trips across the country twice each year from 1939 to
1942, accompanied by my governess. These trips took four days, and were ex-
tremely exciting and romantic adventures, especially for a young child. As I grew
older, I often reflected on m y good fortune to be born in America since, as a Jew,
ff I had been in Europe in those years I would have been on quite different trains.
This set of circumstances suggested a piece that would inClude not only the sounds
of American and European trains, but also the voice of m y governess, n o w in her
70s, the voice of a black pullman porter n o w retired, and the voices of several
holocaust survivors, now living in the United States. All of these sounds and voices
are combined with not only the live Kronos quartet, but also with recordings of
the quartet that multiply the number of quartets to three. To prepare the tape of
the train sounds and voices I use sampling keyboards and a sequencer program
in m y Macintosh. The samplers provide a great deal more musical control than if
I were using tape loops and edits, since the sounds and voices can actually be
played on the keyboard.
In the light of m y early tape pieces Its Gonna Rain and Come Out this piece is
both a new direction and a return to m y early concerns about speech and recog-
nizable sound. In Come Out, for example, the words "come out to show them"
were approximately Eb-C-C-D-C. In this work I match the pitch and rhythm of
the speech samples with the string instruments and then have the speech fade out
while the music that matches it continues and develops. The same process is used
with the train sounds. The documentary material dictates the notes and rhythms
for the strings.
This work may serve as the springboard to a new kind of music theater. Provi-
sionally let me call it a documentary music video theater. I can envision m u s i -
cians on stage, not in a pit. They w o u l d be my o w n ensemble in its larger form,
incorporating perhaps 20 musicians and singers including a number of keyboard
samplers. Above them or around them w o u l d be several large video projection
screens, some of which showed documentary synchronized sound images and
others which showed text.
To conclude, it is clear to me that technology has been a formative influence on
m y music since I was a child and it was particularly influential in m y real
compositional beginnings with tape loops in 1965. The gulf that at one time sepa-
rated live music from electronic music on tape has gradually been closing over
the years, primarily through the use of electric keyboard instruments to be either
electric instruments, triggering devices or both. With the introduction of sam-
piing machines it would seem that many of the needs for tape playback during
a musical performance can n o w be taken over b y musicians playing sampling
 My Life with Technology 21

keyboards. What also seems clear is that ideas from technology continue to be
fruitful influences on instrumental and vocal music. It is an influence that I for
one have welcomed and look forward to working with even more closely in the
future.