Happy 90th Birthday, Steve Reich!

Fifteen years ago, I was asked to contribute to an NPR tribute to composer Steve Reich on the occasion of his 75^th birthday; this was what I wrote: 

Listening to It's Gonna Rain takes me back to my adolescence in the Bay Area of the 1970s, when I spent much of my spare time listening to repetitive, grainy electronic music in the basements of my socially challenged but technologically brilliant friends. 
 
It's Gonna Rain, from 1965, is the piece in which Steve Reich discovered the process of phasing. As you listen you can sense Reich capturing lightning in a bottle. We hear those three words in Brother Walter's dynamic lilt repeated over and over again, overlapping with itself, constantly creating new rhythms, melodies and harmonies, all stemming from the natural cadence of the human voice. We hear the roots of so much of what is to come in music, not only in Reich's own work but also in electronica and even hip-hop. And we hear a passionate shout-out to the countless lonely nerdy guys that came in his wake who spend hours fooling around with electronics and marveling at the happy accidents that occur. These are the guys that have changed the world in the last 46 years, and Steve Reich is one of them. 

Interesting to read this now, when those “nerdy guys” seem much less benign, and Reich’s most recent work has turned away from electronic experimentation.  

In fact, I think it’s fascinating to consider It’s Gonna Rain alongside Traveler’s Prayer, which Reich wrote in 2020 just as the world was shutting down due to the COVID pandemic, which, as the composer stated, shifted the gravity of the work. It's a setting of three Bible verses: the first is from book 23 of Exodus: 

Behold, I send a message before you to protect you on the way and to bring you to the place I have prepared. 

The second is from Book 49 of Genesis: 

To Your lifeline I cling, Eternal 

The third is from Psalm 121: 

The Eternal will guard your departure and arrival from now until the end of time. 

It’s Gonna Rain also uses apocalyptic imagery from the Old Testament. Reich recorded Brother Walter, a San Francisco street preacher, deliver a sermon about Noah’s Ark, which he then deconstructed into tape loops that created a kind of audio tone poem that turned the preacher’s spoken words into the Flood itself. In Traveler’s Prayer, however, there are no electronics, relying on the unique timbre created by the combination of four singers, two vibraphones, piano and string octet.  

Listening to these two works in succession not only illustrates how Reich’s style did and did not change in the course of the 55 years that separated them, but also, in this year of America’s 250^th birthday, how they fit within the American fire-and-brimstone tradition, from William Billings’ hymns to Charles Ives’s collages of hymns, or the Biblical allegories contained in two of the greatest American novels, Melville’s Moby-Dick and Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Reich’s ability to tap into Hebrew cantillation, Baroque counterpoint, Baptist street preaching, and mid-20^th century recording technology, all in the service of offering us both stern warnings and loving comfort in the face of the end times, distinguishes him as not only a great contemporary composer but a distinctly American one.