Rethinking Reich

Described by music critic Alex Ross as "the most original musical thinker of our time" and having received innumerable accolades in a career spanning over fifty years, composer Steve Reich is considered by many to be America's greatest contemporary composer. His music, however, remains largely underresearched. Rethinking Reich redresses this imbalance, providing a space for prominent and emerging scholars to reassess the composer's contribution to music in the twentieth century. Featuring fourteen tightly focused and multifarious essays on various aspects of Reich's work--ranging from analytical, aesthetic, and archival studies to sociocultural, philosophical, and ethnomusicological reflections--this edited volume reveals new insights, including those enabled by access to the growing Steve Reich Collection at the Paul Sacher Foundation archive, the premier institution for primary research on twentieth-century and contemporary classical music. This volume takes on the timely task of challenging the hegemony of Reich's own articulate and convincing discourses on his music, as found in his Writings on Music (OUP, 2002), and breaks new ground in the broader field of minimalism studies.

Pwyll ap Siôn is Professor of Music at Bangor University, Wales. He studied music at Oxford University. Ap Siôn has published books and articles in the areas of minimalist and postminimalist music, quotation and intertextuality in music and minimalist music in film and media. He has contributed record reviews and articles for Gramophone music magazine since 2007.

Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. He is the author of The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form (2013), co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, vols. 1 and 2 (2014) with Jason Stanyek, and has published work on Steve Reich, minimalism, new media, Marxism, country music, and other topics. He is the leader of the independent Americana band, The Gated Community.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Introduction: Reich in Context
Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn

Part I Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns
1. "Departing to other spheres": Psychedelic Science Fiction, Perspectival Embodiment, and the Hermeneutics of Steve Reich's Four Organs
-- by Sumanth Gopinath

2. "Moving Forward, Looking Back": Resulting Patterns, Extended Melodies, Eight Lines, and the influence of the West on Steve Reich
-- by Pwyll ap Siôn

3. Different Tracks: Narrative sequence, Harmonic (Dis)continuity and Structural Organization in Steve Reich's Different Trains and The Cave
-- by Maarten Beirens

4. "We are not trying to make a political piece": The Reconciliatory Aesthetic of Steve Reich's The Cave
-- by Ryan Ebright

Part II Repetition, Speech, and Identity
5. Repetition, Speech, and Authority in Steve Reich's "Jewish" Music
-- by Robert Fink

6. Steve Reich's Dramatic Sound Collage for the Harlem Six: Towards a Prehistory of Come Out
-- by John Pymm

7. From World War Two to the "War on Terror": An Examination of Steve Reich's "Docu-Music" Style in WTC 9/11
-- by Celia Fitz-Walter

Part III Reich Revisited: Sketch Studies
8. "Save as ... »": Hybrid Resources in the Steve Reich Collection
-- by Matthias Kassel

9. Sketching a New Tonality: A Preliminary Assessment of Steve Reich's Sketches for Music for 18 Musicians in Telling the Story of This Work's Approach to Tonality
-- by Keith Potter

10. Improvisation, Two Variations on a Watermelon, and a New Timeline for Piano Phase
-- by David Chapman

11. Steve Reich's Counterpoints and Computers: Rethinking the 1980s
-- by Twila Bakker

Part IV Beyond the West: Bali, Buddhism and Africa
12. Afro-Electric Counterpoint
-- by Martin Scherzinger

13. That's All It Does: Steve Reich and Balinese Gamelan
-- by Michael Tenzer

14. "Machine Fantasies into Human Events": Reich and Technology in the 1970s
-- by Kerry O'Brien