STEVE REICH: My music!

RICHARD KESSLER: That's very true.

STEVE REICH: Well, I think, for my money, The London Symphony Orchestra is the best orchestra around for the music I write. But I've stopped writing for the orchestra in 1987 when I was writing the "Four Sections," which I think is a reasonably successful piece for orchestra. At that time, I realized a number of things. Number one: the orchestra is not my orchestra in a purely acoustical, musical sense. The basic idea of the orchestra is that you will get more volume by doubling, and we'll make balances between the brass, which are naturally loud, the woodwinds, which are reasonably loud, and the strings, which aren't, by simply doubling the same parts. So when the little girl says to Mom, "Why are all these people playing the same line?" the answer is "to make it louder."

Well, there is a price to pay for that, and it is the rhythmic agility: everyone is slightly sharp or slightly flat, because they're human beings, and the note is literally fatter. If you put it on an oscilloscope you'd see, well, it's wider. And you feel that. The sound of a string section is drastically different from the sound of a solo violin. I began to realize that what I'd been doing over the years was simply to use the microphone to make balances, not to make the music louder, but so that I could have a singer who's singing in an early music style or a pop style, which is basically small voice, no vibrato, to be heard over percussion and keyboards). Well, when you amplify, it's very simple.

But in that simple little fact, what you're doing is turning over the history of the orchestra: The orchestra begins roughly around the time of Haydn. There are thirty-five or forty musicians, then the clarinets come in, and then Beethoven puts in the trombones, so you've got to have more strings to balance that off. Then comes Wagner and huge brass, expanded winds to balance that and then it stops. And basically the Wagner orchestra, the eighteen firsts and sixteen seconds and so on, is still with us. It made perfectly good sense for Haydn to have what he had. It made perfectly good sense for Beethoven to have what he had. And it made perfectly good sense for Wagner to have what he had. But once the microphone was invented, there was a complete other possibility: you could either use an acoustical organization created for an acoustical reality, and if you want it louder, you have more people doing it, [or you can amplify].

The invention of the microphone introduced new possibilities. Besides, I'm sixty-one years old; I grew up listening to more recorded music than I did live music (and I dare say I was the first of a generation where almost all the composers after me would have that precise experience). I realized I was used to the sound of music coming out of a loudspeaker. Now, everyone is quick to tell you that there's a lot wrong with that, but there are a lot of things that are very interesting, as well: the little details of execution; the slide on the string; the sound of the resin on the bow. The little intimate details of the performance come to us because the microphone is very close to the player. So you create the possibility for a great deal of detail, if you keep the texture clear enough, where that stuff is giving you little bits of energy, if you like. You hear every bow stroke; you hear the articulation in the clarinet reed, etc., and you don't think about that but it gets to you. So when you use amplification, it just becomes a reality of the performance.

And if you take the same piece, like "Tehillim" which was done by my group with solo strings amplified and then Mehta did it with twelve firsts (violins), it still feels like "what's this big, heavy thing that we're trying to pull along with this small ensemble inside of it." And that's partly my own fault too, for going for the glory of the New York Philharmonic and realizing that it was subverting the music. It took most of the eighties for me to become clear with that because back then my own ensemble had gotten larger after "Music for Eighteen Musicians," and I was thinking: "Well, this is ridiculous. I can't travel around the world with an orchestra or anything like that. If I want to write for the orchestra, write for the orchestra." I was thinking: "Oh, three oboes interlocking and three clarinets interlocking and three strings" -- but each of the three strings was eight people. So "The Desert Music" was to me the most successful piece I did that way. The string orchestra is divided in three and the percussion goes in the center, right in front of the composer, or right in front of the conductor (that's a slip!). Right in front of the conductor, in a piece where the ictus, the beat, is going all the time. If the strings around the percussion can hear it, then it's fine. If you put the percussion sixty feet away from the conductor in the back of the hall, and the strings are sitting right next to the conductor, he's beating what the percussionist is playing but the 60-foot delay in the sound causes the whole orchestra to not be together.

It's impossible. So I rearranged the orchestra this way. The result: well, if you have an enormous amount of rehearsal, you can get a reasonably good result, but it guarantees that no one is ever going to play the piece because they've got to completely re-seat the orchestra; they've got all the electronic paraphernalia; they'd take one look and say "Well, what else have you got?" So I began to realize that my musical acoustical difficulties were also intimately tied with the sociology and practical realities of stagecraft. Also, if you introduce electronics, they might do it once, on commission, and then you can kiss it good-bye. Then I began to realize that my orchestra is my ensemble and there are all these wonderful European ensembles like it, such as the Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Schoenberg Ensemble, Klang Forum Wien, Ictus Ensemble, Avanti Ensemble, and they're growing like mushrooms all over Europe.

RICHARD KESSLER: What are your thoughts about the orchestral repertoire issue? The orchestra industry is certainly of -- or will be of-importance to our readers. The orchestra industry is facing many challenges: for all intents and purposes, the repertoire stopped expanding in the fifties. There are a small number of works that have entered the core repertoire in the past 30 years. There are many people in the industry wondering what to do about aging audiences, a repertoire that isn't growing, and composers like you, who aren't interested in writing for it the medium. What do you make of all this? You talked a little about the social and cultural context earlier...

STEVE REICH: I feel that the orchestra is no more important and is just another variation on promusica antiqua. It's very important that early music, like Perotin, be heard. For me it's just as important that Perotin be heard as it is that Mozart be heard. As a matter of fact, I personally would much rather hear Perotin than Mozart. But whether you like it or not, these guys are both very, very important composers in their age. They were the top of their historical period. Why should we hear more Brahms than Josquin? Because there's an organization that plays it that's absorbing so much money. But if you were to just weigh it on the musical scales, you'd say "Well, it depends on your stylistic preference, but this is great music and that's great music."

My feeling is, and I know there are others who've voiced similar ideas, that it would be interesting if there were fewer orchestras, and other musicians would simply go and form whatever kind of groups they want to form. Those orchestras would be larger and encompass all the history of western music. For example: you'd have a group of about 120 musicians that would include a baroque and early music group directed by music director A, who is not an orchestral romantic specialist. Then you would have the large romantic orchestra, with a few gambists from the early music group who might want to sit in the cello section -- that would have one of the name conductors in the classical and romantic field. Then you'd have a new music ensemble with a separate music director, another one of the conductors who we could name, with somewhere between fifteen and forty people, again including some crossover from the early music group and from the other orchestra; This sort of large center, sort of like a medical center, would be able to tour. These three major groups would have a couple of venues: a large two-thousand-seater, and a one-thousand-seater, and would employ 120 or more musicians. They would pool their advertising muscle and their appeal to a much wider musical taste.

We're now seeing pop record departments selling medieval music -- how about that! Who would've thought that Gregorian chant was going to be a hot numero in any form! Well, live and learn. I think that's great. No matter how you look at it, I think it would be a very interesting way to go. If you had a regular opportunity to do Gabrieli and also do some Wagner, what's wrong? And you could go out in different groups. Everything that players in orchestras complain about, the routine and repetitions, wouldn't be completely solved, but the people who want to change that would have the possibility in the extended repertoire, the extended number of chamber-sized ensembles that were under one aegis.

One of the most wonderful orchestral events I've ever been to was one Michael Tilson Thomas did in June of 1996, where he had a festival including The Grateful Dead (sans Jerry Garcia). On the greatest day, I did "Clapping Music" with one of the percussionists out there and Meredith Monk sang; they did Lou Harrison's organ concerto; they did an improvisation on Henry Cowell's "Tone Cluster" with Michael Tilson Thomas and members of The Grateful Dead, and half the audience was "deadheads" who were dead quiet and listening to everything, really getting off on it. The orchestra itself never came out and appeared as an orchestra, but all these ensembles were right there. This is what every orchestra has within itself, but somehow it can never find the scheduling and the marketing expertise to present itself that way. Anyway, it's certainly possible and perhaps it will happen.

Personally, I don't go to orchestral concerts. I don't listen to that repertoire -- I say it over and over again. Back in 1955, when I studied music history at Cornell University with William Austin, he taught it like this: He started with Gregorian chant, we went up to the death of Bach and Handel in 1750, and jumped to Debussy, Duke Ellington, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Charlie Parker, Bartók, the works. And then we went back in the Spring semester and we did Haydn to Wagner. He used to say that he saw a continuity in the back-to-Bach of Stravinsky and the whole neoclassicism of the earlier part of the twentieth century, and an awareness of earlier music in the fifties. Beginning with the Swingle Singers, there was a neo-baroque revival -- a sensitivity to the authentic instrumentation that began then. There was something in the Zeitgeist that people were saying "We're really tuned in to hearing early music." Alfred Deller was the first counter-tenor to appear at that time.

I loved Ella Fitzgerald and I loved Joan Baez and I loved Alfred Deller and I loved Glenn Gould. So what else is new? That was one mentality, and the other mentality was the growth of German classicism and romanticism. And I think there's a certain truth to that. The sonata allegro form appears really in the classical period: sonatas are not the same sonatas in the baroque period, so the kind of discursive, developmental thinking that goes on from 1750 anywhere on up to Schoenberg is really a body of thinking quite different from what preceded it, and in a sense, from what followed it.

RICHARD KESSLER: I thought it was interesting reading other interviews you gave, where you were talking about the French impressionists, Debussy, also talking about Stravinsky, also taking about Charlie Parker.

STEVE REICH: Right. That's a communality right there.

RICHARD KESSLER: And the Parker connection, Parker studied Stravinsky and the French impressionists.

STEVE REICH: Well, you can hear it. When I was a kid, I realized later, you could go into an elevator and you'd hear something that was sort of a rip-off of Ravel, you know? And you'd hear it in the movies. [Sometimes I hear] really great music like Parker and Miles Davis and realize, well, that dominant 11th with the tonic on top of it that I used in 'Four Organs,' is in Thelonious Monk and it's in Debussy, too. It was a way of loosening up tonality without leading to complete chromaticism. It seems to me there's a fork in the road: this way Wagner, that way Debussy. And I think that most Americans, consciously or unconsciously, have traveled one of these "roads (for example, Aaron Copland). It's like saying "I want to stretch tonality but I'm not getting rid of it." Of course, there are the Americans who did follow the German direction (Charles Ives is probably an exception, because you could probably argue that he was closer to the German tradition than not. But he is an odd case).

RICHARD KESSLER: Yeah, he sounds very German, particularly in, say, his Second Symphony.

STEVE REICH: But, nevertheless, what we love about Ives, the quoting of the hymn tunes, the polytonality which is really not at all those techniques.

RICHARD KESSLER: And he struggled with it.

STEVE REICH: Yeah, I think he did but I think that most of the other people didn't, like Gershwin and Copland. If you take a look at "minimal" music -- referring to Ravel in particular, you'll see a lot of repeated material in the middle register with a different bass. It's just modally re-harmonized. Well, you know, welcome to the club, man, just an offshoot of French impressionism!

The full interview, complete with audio clips, can be found at In the 1st Person: Steve Reich.