Challenging Adorno: How Steve Reich and the Minimalism Blurred the Culture Dichotomy of Modernism

Introduction

‘There's just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history and Steve Reich is one of them.’ (The Guardian, 2000)

Steve Reich (1936- ), along with La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Philip Glass, is considered to be an early pioneer of minimalism, a musical movement which originated in the late 1950s and 60s. Minimalism in music can be loosely characterised as having a number of attributes (Gann, 1998:299):

Cyclic repetition
Static harmony
Static instrumentation
Non-western influences

This essay will attempt to look at the way in which Reich’s music and his compositional processes, and minimalism in general, have ‘actively blurred’ Adorno’s modernist dichotomy between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture (Cox, 2000:287). Throughout the argument I will use Reich’s 1982 work ‘New York Counterpoint’ as an example of the concepts discussed. Before I begin to do this it is important to look at Reich’s early work and the development of the musical philosophies and practices that characterise Reich as a composer today.

The Use of Tape and Phasing

After obtaining a Masters in composition in 1963, Reich worked on a number of film scores for small productions. It was during this period that he began to experiment with tape loops. In 1964 Reich recorded a sermon by a black preacher, known as Brother Walter, preaching about Noah and the Flood. Reich was drawn to musical qualities of the speech and began to make tape loops with the recording. While he was playing two identical loops of Brother Walter saying ‘It’s gonna rain’ against each other to create new variations of sounds, he discovered the technique of phasing. It was this technique that ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ (1965) is based upon. Phasing occurs when two identical sounds are played together at minutely different speeds. This causes them to move slowly out of phase, creating a gradually shifting pattern of sounds until they eventually shift back into phase, one loop behind another.

In 1966 Reich released Come Out which also utilized phasing. Reich sees this work as a ‘refinement of ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ both in choice of speech source, and in the exact working out of the phase-shifting process’ (Reich, 1974:18). This piece is based around a loop taken from the recording of Daniel Hamm, discussing his treatment by the police after the Harlem riots of 1964, in which he says ‘Come out to show them’. This loop is set off against itself at varying speeds to again create the phasing effect. At various points throughout the thirteen minutes of the piece the loop splits in an exponential way until 8 separate loops are present and playing at various speeds. At this point the words lose their semantic meaning and the listener is forced to focus on the tonal and rhythmic patterns of the voice.

After these two works Reich experimented on the application of the phasing technique to musical instruments and produced ‘Piano Phase’ (1967), in which two pianists play a number of twelve note repeating patterns which move slowly out of time with each other. The result of this phase-shifting is that new rhythms and harmonic patterns become apparent to the listener as phase-shifting occurs.

A New Direction

In 1970 Reich travelled to Ghana to study the drumming of the Ewe tribe. It was this visit that influenced Reich to continue and reaffirm his interest in African rhythm. After returning from Ghana to New York Reich recorded his longest work, ‘Drumming’ (1971), which signifies the increasing importance of percussion in Reich’s compositions and the further incorporation of non-western musical ideas into Reich’s music. In this piece the phase-shifting techniques utilised in the earlier tape works are still present but are more organic and less mechanically implemented. This is the first major instance of the transition from microscopic to macroscopic detail in Reich’s music. Shortly after this Reich composed ‘Clapping Music’ (1972), and this, says Reich, ‘ marks the end of my use in the gradual phase shifting process’ (Reich, 1972:68).

Throughout the 1970’s Reich’s work can be seen to become increasingly complex, both in the number of instruments used and the number of harmonic relationships present within the piece. In these piece the move from microscopic to macroscopic harmonic variation is noticeable, a development of the minute phase-shifting process to a canon. This new outlook culminated in a major composition ‘Music for 18 Musicians’ (1976), one of Reich’s most celebrated works.

The Counterpoint Series

In 1982 Reich released the first of his ‘Counterpoint’ series, ‘Vermont Counterpoint’. It was followed in 1985 by ‘New York Counterpoint’ and then in 1987 by ‘Electric Counterpoint’. The counterpoint series was a return to the ideas first utilised in Reich’s early works, with a soloist playing against a number of pre-recorded tape loops. It was also a step back from the increasingly large and complex compositions Reich had begun to compose, with no percussive accompaniment. Although returning to tape, Reich still utilised the later-developed process of canons to create melodic and harmonic movement within the piece.

‘New York Counterpoint’, in Reich’s words, is ‘a continuation of the ideas found in Vermont Counterpoint’ (Reich, 1985:135). It is a piece for amplified clarinet and 10 pre-recorded clarinet parts. Reich states that he uses techniques found in his earlier works:

‘The use of interlocking melodic patterns played by multiples of the same instrument can be found in my earlier works…In the nature of its patterns and their harmonic content, and the faster rate of change, the piece reflects my more recent works...’ (Reich, 1985:135)

As in the early tape pieces, Reich utilises a perceptual anomaly between ‘whether one hears measures of three groups of four eighth-notes, or four groups of three eighth notes’. He goes on to say,

‘In the last movement, the function of the bass clarinet is to accent first one and then the other of these possibilities, while the upper clarinets essentially do not change. The effect is to vary the perception of what is essentially not changing.’ (Reich, 1985:135).

Although Reich has abandoned many of the techniques incorporated into his early tape pieces, he has maintained others which characterise his work, namely a ‘strong, steady pulse, and strictly diatonic and tonal harmonies’ (n.a., 2002) and the use of repetition. Having left behind the early phase shifting technique associated with Reich, repetition processes are utilized in the form of canons to create much more complex and a faster rate of harmonic movement.

Minimalism verses Modernism

‘One could say of Adorno, he invents meaningless intellectual jargon to justify the fact that he likes Schönberg and doesn’t like Stravinsky.’ (Reich, 1994:185)

Adorno’s theory of a dichotomy in the arts, and society in general, between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture is becoming increasingly irrelevant in today’s globalised world. Intentionally or not, the minimalist movement has played an important role in the blurring of the boundaries of this modernist dichotomy.

Adorno was determined to keep ‘high’ classical music inaccessible to the public as he believed they represented deluded victims of the modern materialist culture. He believed that ‘the very autonomy of serious music, its potential for critical opposition to modern society and to the ideological underpinning of that society depended crucially upon its inaccessibility’ (Witkins, 1998:11). Adorno himself ensured that these discussions remained within the realms of academia by producing difficult texts requiring the reader to have a full understanding of technical musical analysis and a familiarity in German philosophy.

In contrast, Reich’s essay ‘Music as a Gradual Process’, states ‘I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear processes happening...The compositional process and the sounding music become one and the same thing.’ (Reich, 1968:34). Reich is wanting, and allowing, the listener to hear the compositional process, the structure behind the music. Reich ensures his music is accessible to the listener and that they are able to appraise the processes behind the music and also to enjoy the spirituality of the music (Jordan, 2002). By making the music accessible to all Reich is opening up his music to those outside the world of academia and is in direct opposition to the modernist elitist views taken by Adorno et al.

Adorno believed that music was constructed from ‘inherited musical structures’ developed and refined over time (Witkin, 1998:13). Music was based upon the strict rules developed over the centuries, and the composer’s creative use or refinements of these structures determine the value of a work. In this sense modernist analysis is based upon the aesthetics of music and rejects any sort of subjective feeling in the listener as a determination of authenticity. It is in this respect that Adorno rejected the use of non-Western musical ideas within music, believing it had no context in Western musical tradition.

In comparison, although still basing their music upon the rigorous use of structure, from the outset the minimalist composers rejected the traditional and historical musical structures which were central to true modernist composition and instead turned to the music of non-western cultures as a basis for their compositions. Reich himself studied Balinese gamelan, Ghanan drumming and Hebrew Cantillation and incorporated techniques from these forms into his compositions (Reich was also heavily influenced by jazz, elements of which can be heard in New York Counterpoint). Probably the most important contribution came from the study of Gahu, a drumming technique from the Ewe tribe in Ghana. Although Reich did not incorporate non-Western ‘sounds’ into his works, he used the rhythmic structures he learnt in Ghana within his own compositions (Reich, 1973:70-71). The most common structural influences found in his works is the use of a twelve-eight time signature, repeating patterns in which the downbeats occur at different points and the combinations of three groups of four eighth-notes and four groups of three eighth-notes. This incorporation of non-western rhythmical ideas can be found in New York Counterpoint, which uses the rhythmical blueprint Reich learned from the Gahu tribe: a 12-8 meter, repetitive canons and contrapuntal rhythmical ambiguities.

Reich can be seen to be in direct opposition to Adorno’s ideas of the value of musical aesthetics. Although the deterministic aspect of Reich’s performances mirrors the view Adorno has upon performance being a tool to convey the intentions of the composer rather than an outlet for the expression of the performer, Reich says of performance “This music is not the expression of the momentary state of mind of the performers while playing. Rather the momentary state of mind of the performers while playing is largely determined by the ongoing composed slowly changing music”. He also states “Obviously music should put all within listening range into a state of ecstasy”. This is referring to a subjective experience or enjoyment of music, which in Adorno’s theories should come from an objective evaluation of the musical content.

Adorno also rejected repetition as a musical function, rubbishing Stravinsky for ‘his repetitious ostinato patterns, which Adorno heard as seducing listeners into passive acceptance of the most barbarous elements of encroaching totalitarianism’ (McClary, 1999:292). Adorno championed Schoenberg for his complete rejection of repetition as an operative in music. Since the likes of Adorno and Schoenberg, repetition has become the predominant musical structure within music. Minimalism itself based its compositional process around cyclic repetition. Reich has used repetition as the predominant compositional technique throughout his career, from the early tape pieces which used cyclic repetition to create gradual textural change, to works such as ‘New York Counterpoint’ which use repetition and the use of canons as tools to create complex harmonic and melodic movement within a composition. Adorno believed repetition was a regression in the compositional process, but I believe Reich has shown that it can be used as a compositional tool to create music with both progression and complexity.

It could be argued that the prevalence of repetition in contemporary western music (in both the popular and classical traditions) is more a result of technology and its facility towards repetitive music (McClary, 1999:292). With the help of tape machines Reich was using repetition as a compositional tool long before he became drawn to African rhythms. Reich also sees his time in Ghana as a ‘reaffirmation of the compositional processes [he] was already using.’ (Reich, 1973:70-71). But in today’s musical landscape non-Western culture has integrated itself into music in other ways, an example being modern electronic music which incorporates not only rhythms from other cultures but also instruments, sounds and languages which are non-Western in origin. Reich himself has incorporated Hebrew text and cantillation techniques within his music, and example being the 1981 work, ‘Tehillim’ (Reich, 1982:105).

Returning to the point of technology it is interesting to note Reich’s reliance on technology, not only as a compositional tool but also as a requirement for the performance of his works. For example, the compositional processes which were used in his early speech tapeworks was made possible only by the use of tape and the minute differences in playback speed of two tape decks. Even New York Counterpoint, one of Reich’s more ‘conventional’ pieces is performed through the use of ten clarinet parts pre-recorded on tape. Reich’s more recent works have even gone so far as to incorporate music with video, in a piece called ‘ The Cave’ (1993). Intended as a social commentary on current affairs within the world, one can assume Adorno’s view of such an entity as another manifestation of mass culture, where the use of moving image detracts from the aesthetic quality of the music.

Conclusion

From the outset Reich and the minimalism movement in music have blurred the boundaries of the modern “high” and “low” culture dichotomy in many ways. By incorporating non-Western influences and rejecting Adorno’s musical aesthetics, minimalism acts as a bridge between classical and popular music. Indeed it shares many traits with popular music, and has distanced itself from the elitism of “high” art by opening up the music, allowing the audience to identify and appreciate the compositional processes involved, whilst still being encouraged to enjoy the subjective experience of the music.

Modernism was Adorno’s attempt to create an objective study of music, rejecting subjective experience and social influences on music. But in today’s musical landscape, with the dominance of popular music, increasing hybridisation of styles and the consumption of music on a more individual basis, modernism has become largely irrelevant and out of place. Music has become a reflection of identity, a reflection of one’s position in society. Because of this, the analysis of music from a social viewpoint seems much more relevant today than the alienating, extreme and elitist viewpoint of the modern condition.

Bibliography

Cox, C. & Warner, D. (2000) Audio Culture: Writings in Modern Music. New York: Continuum.

Gann, K. (1998) ‘Thankless Attempts at a Definition of Minimalism.’ in Cox, C. & Warner, D. (ed.) Audio Culture: Writings in Modern Music. New York: Continuum.

Jordan, R. (2002) Transcending the fragmentation of experience – The Acousmetre on the Air in the Films of Michael Snow. Available from:

http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/Sound_Snow.html [accessed 27/04/2006]

McClary (1999) ‘Rap, Minimalism and Structures of Time in the Late Twentieth-Century Culture’ in Cox, C. & Warner, D. (ed.) Audio Culture: Writings in Modern Music. New York: Continuum.

[n.a.] (2002) ‘Steve Reich’. Classical.net. Available from: www.classical.net/stevereich [accessed 21/03/2006]

Reich, S. (1968) ‘Music as a Gradual Process’ in Reich, S. (ed.) Writings on Music 1965-2000. New York: Oxford University Press

Reich, S. (1972) ‘Clapping Music’ in Reich, S. (ed.) Writings on Music 1965-2000. New York: Oxford University Press

Reich, S. (1973) ‘Postscript to a Brief Study of Balinese and African Music’ in Reich, S. (ed.) Writings on Music 1965-2000. New York: Oxford University Press

Reich, S. (1974) ‘Early Works’ in Reich, S. (ed.) Writings on Music 1965-2000. New York: Oxford University Press

Reich, S. (1982) ‘Hebrew Cantillation as an Influence on Composition’ in Reich, S. (ed.) Writings on Music 1965-2000. New York: Oxford University Press

Reich, S. (1985) ‘New York Counterpoint’ in Reich, S. (ed.) Writings on Music 1965-2000. New York: Oxford University Press

Reich, S. (1994) ‘Beautiful/Ugly’ in Reich, S. (ed.) Writings on Music 1965-2000. New York: Oxford University Press

Witkin, R. W. (1998) Adorno on Music. London: MPG Books

Discography

Reich, S. (1965) It’s Gonna Rain.

Reich, S. (1966) Come Out.

Reich, S. (1967) Piano Phase.

Reich, S. (1971) Drumming.

Reich, S. (1972) Clapping Music.

Reich, S. (1976) Music for 18 Musicians.

Reich, S. (1981) Tehillim.

Reich, S. (1982) Vermont Counterpoint.

Reich, S. (1985) New York Counterpoint.

Reich, S. (1987) Electric Counterpoint.

Reich, S. & B. Korot (1993) The Cave.