Conference Agenda

Naomi Cumming’s “The Horrors of Identification: Reich’s ‘Different Trains’” (1997) established an influential precedent for analyzing minimalist music through a subjective lens. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, gesture, and semiotics, Cumming positions an interpretive subject, whether reader or listener, to consider Steve Reich’s Different Trains both musically (repetition, speech, patterns) and historically (World War II, the Holocaust). She demonstrates how the musical motives and accompanying paradiddle ostinato acquire different meanings when considered within varying historical frames.While Cumming’s analysis focuses primarily on the first two movements, her brief comment on the third—“After the War”—notes only that it offers “no glib resolution to trauma” (149). This paper extends Cumming's discussion of trauma into the final movement. Using a scoreless analytical approach, I consider how subject positioning shifts in response to newly introduced musical and historical material, as well as to the recontextualization of earlier motifs following the War. I argue that trauma in the third movement is expressed both implicitly and explicitly. The movement opens with a “speechless” motive in the cello, answered by the viola while the violins weave a contrapuntal texture. Approximately thirty seconds later, the speech fragment from which the motive originates—“And the War was over”—is introduced. This Baroque-like imitation at the outset conveys a pre-War sentiment without linguistic markers.

After several episodes of imitation, differentiated by tempo and speech fragments, Reich recapitulates the first movement’s paradiddle and motives in a new melodic and harmonic context. The listening subject can explicitly recall this material because of their previous exposure to it. In the final section, the music transitions to triple rhythm and a new tonal center, yet the traumatic events of the second movement continue to resonate. Fleeting passages from the quartet fade away in the end, suggesting both a potential for forward movement and the irrevocable transformation that trauma leaves behind.

This paper examines Ludwig Wittgenstein’s influence on Steve Reich through a critical analysis of Reich’s own portrayal of understanding. Using clues found in Reich’s discussions of Wittgenstein, I build a fuzzy representation of “Reich’s philosopher.” I then use that representation to examine Wittgensteinian influence in existing analytical approaches toward Reich’s music.

Reich has been vocal about Wittgenstein’s influence on his compositional approaches. He studied Wittgenstein through his undergraduate philosophy degree at Cornell, and has spent various periods of his life in deep study of Wittgenstein’s collected writings, going so far as to set texts from Wittgenstein’s writings in his later works. Despite this influence, Reich’s comments on Wittgenstein do not provide much detail with which to understand Reich’s specific views toward Wittgenstein. To date, Robert Cowan’s 1986 article exploring what he sees as similarities between the two men’s writings remains the only detailed examination of these philosophical influences. What is missing from Cowan’s work, however, is Reich’s own positionality, suggesting that a revisitation of the topic is warranted.

The contexts surrounding Reich’s often sparsely-detailed comments offer opportunities to add layers of positionality to our picture of Reich’s philosophical influences. In an interview with Jonathan Cott, Reich mentions “I wrote a thesis criticizing Gilbert Ryle for criticizing Wittgenstein.” (Reich, quoted in Cott 1996). Comments like these provide illuminating footholds into Reich’s formative thoughts on Wittgenstein: by placing himself against a critic of Wittgenstein, Reich reveals a particular positionality toward his approach.

While this influence is challenging to trace from Reich’s comments alone, its clear impact on Reich’s music is illuminated through the fact that so many analytical approaches toward Reich’s music have similar philosophical groundings in Wittgensteinian thought. Ian Quinn’s (1997) and Kristen Wallentinsen’s (2022) analyses using fuzzy set theory are based in Wittgenstein’s family resemblances, while Philip Duker’s (2013) ideas of palimpsests and trace melodies and Gretchen Horlacher’s (2000) theories of multiple meter invoke Wittgenstein’s notions of “seeing as,” just to name a few. I posit that understanding Reich’s approach to Wittgenstein will allow music theorists to better understand the influence that we are already seeing analytically.

Throughout his career, Steve Reich will develop a compositional technique, workshop it in a few pieces, then put it away, sometimes to be used later. I demonstrate this practice with a technique I call the “tritone bop.” In its most common form, the device is prefaced by a jaunty texture that establishes a tritone-heavy tonal space in the upper registers: often a whole-tone collection or subset, plus one or two notes from the other WT collection. Then Reich introduces a bass line that “bops” between two pitches a tritone apart, which may be new, or drawn from the established pitch space.

Reich first uses the tritone bop in four consecutive pieces composed in the mid-80s (Sextet, New York Counterpoint, Three Movements, The Four Sections). It then disappears for two decades, before reemerging in Double Sextet (2007), Radio Rewrite (2012), and—in a highly modified form—Music for Ensemble & Orchestra (2018). The tritone bop (almost) always appears in the last movement of a multi-movement work, and in each instance, the destabilizing force of the tritone bass highlights and indeed motivates the work’s tonally stable ending. Combined with the usually jocular nature of the musical context surrounding it, the tritone bop has a similar formal function (though not the same formal placement) to that of the sonata form development.

After outlining its common characteristics, I explore differences in its implementation, including details of the tritone-heavy tonal space and the passages’ roles in the movements’ forms. I then describe the expansion of the “bopping bass” idea to the entire outer movements of Double Sextet and the role the tritone bop plays at the start of the last movement. Then, I explore the elevation of the tritone bop from the banal to the learned in Music for Ensemble & Orchestra, where the tritone-laden melodic idea is presented via an extensive fugato, while tritones appear in the sparsely syncopated bass voice, retaining a clear link to earlier practice.

Finally, I situate the tritone bop in the context of other tools that, after a period of honing, found themselves in Reich’s growing compositional toolbox.

This paper examines the hermeneutical and perceptual relationality between Steve Reich’s piece for large ensemble, Reich/Richter, and Gerhard Richter’s film Moving Picture (946-3). In 2019, New York’s The Shed commissioned Reich’s pulse-pattern composition to accompany a collage of animated patterns from Richter’s Abstract painting 946-3. Through a comparative analysis of the rhythmic, formal, and color changes in both works, I distinguish multiple layers of interdisciplinary referentiality between the primary source and the music. Given the corresponding pace of visual and audible structural organization, I argue that Reich/Richter is the Moving Picture’s translation, expanding the discussion on the representational aspects of what is otherwise considered as abstract musical minimalism.

Building on Lawrence Venuti’s theory of translation, which views translation as a means of recontextualizing and decontextualizing its primary work, and William Frawley’s theory of translation as recodification, this paper examines the layers through which Reich/Richter recontextualizes Moving Picture. Reich’s music corresponds to the visuals in pace, melody, and harmony; however, while the sustained tones of the accumulated rhythm conceptually translate the multitude of the film’s vivid images, they audibly decontextualize them, resulting in a hallucinatory effect of the static music and dynamic visuals.

True to its title, Reich/Richter highlights the dichotomy of perception during its live performances alongside the film projection. Still, the interaction between the music and the film serves its communicative purpose depending on the context; therefore, I claim that it acts both as a supplement and a translation of the visuals while also functioning as an independent recontextualized entity in concerts and recordings. Once the two works begin their independent trajectories, Reich/Richter retains the “Richter” aspect in its title, structure, and premiering context. Finally, I observe the film’s sole influence on Reich; namely, Moving Picture indicates a palimpsest of recontextualizations in Reich/Richter with the composer’s body of work, primarily his early works. Thus, Reich/Richter encapsulates Reich’s extensive career at another level, reconnecting it to his composing for film and premiering in galleries in the 1960s.

The years during and immediately following the Great Recession (2007–08) saw Steve Reich explicitly drawing upon rock music, as he did in Four Organs (1970). This undertaking was inspired by genre-crossing composer-performers like Johnny Greenwood (of Radiohead) and Bryce Dessner (of The National), both of whom expressed their admiration for and performed Reich’s music. Three compositions from 2008–2015 illustrate three different attempts to engage with rock music’s history and practices after the long 1960s.

Soon after completing his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Double Sextet (2007), Reich wrote a similar composition using a doubled rock quintet instrumentation (bass guitar, piano, drum set, and two electric guitars), initially imagining “interlocking bass lines that would be clearly heard” and needing electric bass guitars for the task. The result was 2x5 (2008), premiered by Bang on a Can All Stars and including Dessner on electric guitar; in its focus on rock instrumentation and instrumental doubling, it recalls Four Organs. In 2010, Reich heard Radiohead guitarist and composer Johnny Greenwood perform the elder composer’s Electric Counterpoint (1987) with Ensemble Modern; impressed, and learning of Greenwood’s score for There Will Be Blood (2007), listened to songs by Radiohead. He chose two—“Everything in Its Right Place” (Kid A, 2000) and “Jigsaw Falling into Place” (2007, In Rainbows)—to rework as source material for a large ensemble work Radio Rewrite (2012), premiered by Alarm Will Sound. Likening the work to earlier parody masses, variations on preexisting themes, and modernist recompositions, the composer stated that it, “along with Proverb (Perotin) and Finishing the Hat—Two Pianos (Sondheim), is my modest contribution to this genre.” Finally, in 2015 Reich completed another large ensemble work called Pulse, premiered by the International Contemporary Ensemble and conductor David Robertson. A contemplative, American-pastoral piece, Pulse features pulsing electric-bass-guitar eighth notes reminiscent of rock music (especially punk and some post-punk from the 1970s–80s)—while otherwise not referencing rock at all. Serving, in part, as an envoi to his post-millennial flirtations with rock, this textural element is a more understated, and arguably more compelling engagement with rock music than the other two works.

“The Bang on a Can performances,” Steve Reich proclaimed in a 1997 documentary, “have been amongst the most interesting new music concerts of the younger or youngest generation of composers, actually all over America.” A decade earlier, the founders of the composer collective Bang on a Can had programmed Reich’s Four Organs for their first-ever marathon concert of contemporary music in downtown New York. In the years since, Reich and Bang on a Can would develop deep artistic and institutional ties, with the younger organization championing the elder composer’s music, and vice versa.

This ongoing back-and-forth represents a form of “generationalism” in American new music: a self-conscious, performative discourse in which musicians of different ages exchange cultural capital in order to construct themselves as participants in significant “generations” of composers. Since the 1980s, Reich’s canonic status and influence in the U.S. has made him a key engine in such intergenerational exchanges: not just as a “mentor” to the Bang on a Can founders, but also as a major figure for “indie classical” composers of the 2000s such as Nico Muhly and Missy Mazzoli.

This paper considers how Reich has shaped generationalism in American new music since the 1980s. First, I scrutinize the 1987 Bang on a Can marathon, and how the organization’s founders played with Reich’s then-recent elevation to the musical establishment to build their own renegade image. Second, I look at a series of concerts at Carnegie Hall in the 2010s, including the Reich-curated “Three Generations” festival, to examine what Reich’s sanctioning meant to the indie classical generation. And finally, I speculate on what Reich’s presence, or discursive absence, might mean in the 2020s: without the explicit sanctioning of Reich, can today’s young composers acquire the cultural capital to be known, performatively, as a “new generation”? Ultimately I argue that, at 89, Reich’s significance to American new music is not just musical, but symbolic and material: exchanges of generational prestige, which can be translated into financial resources, have helped sustain multiple cohorts of composers but, in our current moment, may be under threat.