When i was a freshman in high school, before I knew anything about Music Theory, when I couldn't tell the difference between Bach and Stravinsky, when I was still caught up in the 80s pop rock trend of Def Leppard, Duran Duran, and Paula Abdul, one of my friends played for me the last movement of Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint, and I thought it was one of the most incredible things I had ever heard.
All of Reich's music has certain signature characteristics that affect me in many ways. His rich harmonies and their gradual unfolding give me a sense of calm, or maybe a feeling of slowly becoming awake. His use of rhythmic pulsation sometimes creates in me a push or a moving forward, and sometimes gives me the feeling of serenity, like the crashing of waves. His use of rhythmic complexity drives me and grooves me. His process of gradual shifting, beit melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, or textural, fascinates me and challenges my ears and my mind, which tries to figure out exactly what I'm hearing and if it's really important.
Sometimes Reich's music is able to do all of these things at once. That type of feeling is impossible to describe.
And his music continues to evolve. When I listen to his more recent works, I can see where its roots are - I can hear things that make the piece unmistakably Reich. Yet it is in a much different place than his early tape pieces and other works he did in the early eighties. And that is inspiring as well.
I've heard different things about Reich as a person from having read about him and from people who have seen him speak, and I have to conclude that much of what I gain from Reich has to do with his musical voice much more than his political one.
We're living in a culture where music
videos are kind of urban folk art. People make them not only in professional studios
but on home desktop computers. You can get a good hit on what folk music is today by
simply looking in the window of any music store. What do you see? Samplers, amplifiers,
electric guitars, and keyboards -- all kinds of electronics. These are street instruments.
That's what kids use to play rock.... [That's how kids make rap.]
When I went to Ghana I almost drowned
while I was swimming off the coast... for me, that was a kind of metaphor for what a
composer faced, from Perotin on down, from a total cultural phenomenon which is nothing
to do with individuals... a lot of American, British, and Europen musicians, when encountering
Indian music in particular, are in a situation where they can drown.
