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> Steve Reich:
> Early tape pieces
> 
> 
> photo by Betty Freeman
> 
> Interview by Jason Gross
> (April 2000)
> 
> As I was doing research for OHM- THE EARLY GURUS OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC (Ellipsis
> Arts), I had the pleasure of interviewing many of the composers that were
> being included in this compilation.  While we had chosen "Pendulum Music" to
> use and were able to get comments from Reich about the piece, he was also
> generous enough to talk about his early tape pieces also.  Though these
> historic works were not also included in the release, I thought this material
> was important enough to share with the online world.
> 
> Thanks to Lee Ranaldo, who pushed me forward to do this.
> 
> 
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> PSF: Where there any earlier tape pieces you heard that influenced your own
> early works with tapes?
> 
> Basically, "It's Gonna Rain" was done in '65. At that point, I already studied
> with (Luciano) Berio.  I had listened to a lot electronic music and a lot of
> musique concrete.  I felt that my heart belonged to the musique concrete
> people.  Even with Stockhausen, I was interested in "Gesung der Jungling"
> because of the boy's voice.
> 
> The bone I had to pick with (Pierre) Schaeffer and that bunch was that if they
> were using the sound of a car crash, they had to lower it by an octave or
> speed it up by an octave, run it through a ring modulator or play it
> backwards.  Why not hear that it's a car crash!  These sounds that you're
> using in the original state have some kind of emotional resonance.  We relate
> to them in various ways.  If you bring them into the music, that brings in an
> emotional, theatrical meaning which is useful.  It's worthwhile maintaining
> and building upon.
>  
> 
> PSF: So how did your early tape pieces actually come about?
> 
> My idea was that I always wanted you to hear what the original sounds were. 
> For "It's Gonna Rain" and "Come Out," that meant what the people were saying. 
> Because the piece ("Rain") was vocal music.  It was setting what they were
> saying in a way that was appropriate to the subject matter.  "It's Gonna Rain"
> is about the end of the world.  In those days, the voice was recorded in '64,
> you had the Cuban Missle Crisis and so it was very much a part of many
> peoples' thinking at that time.  We were at the point where we could all turn
> into so much radioactive ash at any given time.  So while this guy is
> preaching about Noah, it's not something abstract that has nothing to do with
> what's going on in your life.
> 
> It was also a time that was fairly difficult for me personally.  So "It's
> Gonna Rain," especially the second half of it, is very bleak.  You're
> literally hearing the world come apart.  Technically, it's been said many
> times, the discovery of the phasing process was within that piece.  It
> happened with those two little Wollensack tape recorders I had (also used on
> "Phase Piece").  I made identical loops and I thought I would line them up in
> a particular relationship.  Mainly with "it's gonna fall" on top of "rain"
> with the two channel result being "it's gonna... it's gonna... rain...
> rain..." with 180 degrees separation.
> 
> I put on headphones (which were stereo with each ear with a separate plug
> going into the two machines).  By chance, two machines were lined up in
> unison.  So what I heard was this unison sound sort of swimming in my head,
> spatially moving back and forth.  It finally moved over to the left, which
> meant that the machine on the left was slightly faster passing in speed than
> the machine on the right.  So the apparent phenomenon in your head is the
> sound moving to the left, moves down your left shoulder and then across the
> floor! (laughs)  Then after a while, it comes into an imitation and then
> finally after four or five minutes, you hear "it's gonna... it's gonna...
> rain... rain..."
> 
> By the time it got that far, I though to myself "this is unbelievable." 
> Instead of a particular relationship, here is a whole way of making music,
> going from unison through all these contrapuntal relationships, all the way
> back to unison.  All the possible relationships, rational and irrational, are
> there.  So I immediately decided to experiment with just how fast that process
> should happen.  Then in the second half of the piece, it got much more
> complicated, going from two then to four then to eight voices and never coming
> back together again, which is more in keeping with the text.
>  
> 
> PSF: Did you also have the idea that you wanted to explore the semantics of
> what was being said?
> 
> In those days, I was very interested in American poetry.  My interest in
> William Carlos Williams which surfaced in "Desert Music" was something that
> goes back to when I was 16.  Reading Williams led to reading a lot of younger
> American poets like Robert Creely and Charles Olson who were very influenced
> by Williams.  Williams himself was influenced by American speech rhythms.  The
> difficulty that I had as a student setting Williams was that I felt that I had
> set him like you would set an insect in amber.  You'd set it alright but he's
> dead as a doornail.  After I discovered all the constantly changing meters in
> "Tehillim" I thought 'hey, here's a way of dealing with the flexible rhythms
> in Williams' poetry in "The Desert Music."'
> 
> But the tape pieces, it seemed to me, were a way of taking Dr. Williams'
> advice.  Here's American speech rhythm, particularly in the case of the black
> Pentacostal preacher and later in the black kid who was arrested for murder,
> then presenting it just as it is and letting the actual rhythm and cadence of
> the voice form the music.
> 
> PSF:  So you were also studying the musical tone of their speech?
> 
> Yes, absolutely.  If you listen to a black preacher, sometimes it's hard to
> say whether they're singing or speaking.  They're exactly in the cusp between
> speech and song.  It's a very mannered kind of speaking.  It's almost
> chanting.  So it was perfect for this kind of tape manipulation.  Later, when
> I did "Come Out," to get that one little phrase 'come to out to show them,' I
> went through ten hours of tapes- boys, police, mothers, everyone you could
> imagine.  This one phrase seemed emblematic.  The speech-melody is
> everything.  It then generates all kinds of variations upon itself melodically
> and on the meaning of the words.
> 
> PSF: I was going to ask why you had given up on tape music but something
> occurred to me.
> 
> But I haven't!
> 
> PSF: That's right.  When I think of your latter pieces, there is a thread
> there of using recorded speech.
> 
> Speech recordings and their melodies are the basis of  "Different Trains."  In
> 1988, that was done consciously to get back in touch with these early tape
> pieces but instead of saying 'this speech is just as if it is music,' now I'm
> saying 'this is a part of a musical ensemble.'  The Kronos Quartet took its
> cues from the speech melody.   Every time a woman speaks, she is doubled by
> the viola and every time a man speaks, he's doubled by the cello.  With 'City
> Life,' I was saying that it doesn't just have to be voices.  It can be all
> kinds of sounds.
>  
> 
> 
> 
> 
> See the other articles on OHM- THE EARLY GURUS OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC

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