Interview with Steve Reich -the musical genius who invented sampling (among many other achievements)

Last week I was lucky enough to interview Steve Reich, one of the greatest living composers, for an article that ran in The Australian on Friday.

I've been a fan of Reich's ever since the late 1970s/ early 1980s when I heard his masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians for the first time and was blown away.


I'd discovered minimalism earlier through the early works of Terry Riley, including the groundbreaking In C (Reich played on the live premiere, though not on the original Columbia recording).

This was a time when rock groups like The Who and Soft Machine were experimenting with their own Riley-esque pieces (the former with Baba O'Riley). A new kind of magic was in the air and 40 years later it's become part of the air we all breathe - whether people realise it or not (see the full article).

While Reich's contemporary (and - I'm not making this up - his former furniture removal partner) Philip Glass is virtually a household name, Reich's reputation remains a little more closeted. This is largely, I suspect, because he hasn't moved into the audience-expanding worlds of film, dance and other media in the same way as Glass - though he has created two operas in collaboration with his wive, the video artist Beryl Korot. Essentially, though, Reich remains a creature of the music word.

The reason for my interview was that Synergy Percussion is to give the Australasian premiere this Thursday (May 6) to a new Reich piece, Mallet Quartet, at Sydney's City Recital Hall, Angel Place (information and booking here).

Reich proved an articulate, stimulating and enthusiastic interview subject. Full interview here.

Extract:

"Without Reich there would be no John Adams - as the latter has made abundantly clear - but also possibly no Underworld or the Orb, or any of the other electronica outfits whose use of repetition and mesmeric states ultimately derived from the composer and his contemporaries Terry Riley, La Monte Young and Philip Glass.

"Without Reich's groundbreaking early pieces It's Gonna Rain and Come Out, constructed solely from found voices, looped and phased, there may have been no sampling in rock, dance music and hip-hop in later decades. Or at least that sampling may have not sounded quite the same.

"Speaking ahead of next week's Australasian premiere of a new work, Mallet Quartet, to be played by the ensemble Synergy Percussion, Reich slightly differs from (New York music critc Alex) Ross's view that we may be headed towards a final "great fusion" between "intelligent pop artists and extroverted composers speaking more or less the same language".

"I think what we are really seeing is a return to normalcy, not some revolutionary new thing," he says. "Only in the case of Schoenberg did you have this artificial wall between the classical and pop world." Before 20th-century high modernism, Western composers had drawn from popular or folk melodies uncontentiously, from Beethoven (Symphony No. 6) right back to medieval times..."

See here for Reich's official website.

Below: Extract from Different Trains.