
DATE: Sunday, April 27, 1997                TAG: 9704290522

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY CRAIG SHAPIRO, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  162 lines

MAESTRO OF MUSICAL MINIMALISM STEVE REICH'S MONDAY CONCERT PROMISES TO BE A FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHT

ONCE UPON a time, Steve Reich had a good fix on his audiences.

That would be in the late-1960s, ``when I first came to public attention.'' His understatement aside, a performance by Steve Reich and Musicians basically drew other artists: painters, filmmakers, dancers, composers and, even then, a handful of forward-thinking pop musicians.

What a difference three decades make. Now he finds it hard to peg his patrons.

``I used to be able to identify that, but I really can't anymore, and I'm kind of glad about that,'' Reich said. ``Now, there's a joke. We have the blue-haired ladies and the blue-haired ladies.''

The architect of Minimalism, the visionary composer of ``The Cave'' and ``Different Trains,'' playing for the hoi polloi and neo-hip?

``Both ends of the spectrum,'' he said.

It won't be known until Monday night if a wide draw means no empty seats at Norfolk's Harrison Opera House, but this much is guaranteed: The concert promises to be among the highlights of the inaugural Virginia Waterfront International Arts Festival.

Monday's program offers something of a crash course on Reich.

``Drumming'' (1971) is the earliest piece; the most recent, 1995's ethereal ``Proverb.'' Also included are ``Sextet'' (1985), selections from ``The Cave'' (1993) and ``Nagoya Marimbas'' (1994). Joining Reich are percussionists Bob Becker and Russell Hartenberger, both 20-year veterans of his ensemble, and Theatre of Voices, directed by Paul Hillier.

The concert itself is something of a rarity. Eighty-five percent of Reich's tours are spent abroad.

``It's not because people don't care for it here, that they don't understand it here,'' he said from his home in Vermont.

``They know it very well and they like it here. It's a question of money. In Europe particularly, there was a great deal - now there's somewhat less - but there's still incredibly much more tax money than here that is used to support the arts.

``I'm not the only one. It's true of a lot of my contemporaries. It's true of most of the American music we know and love since World War II, starting with the jazz musicians who went over there.''

Reich once said that, in his work, meaning and sound are inseparable, that there is never a false note. He used interviews with theologians, architects, students and writers for ``The Cave,'' a mammoth music-theater piece recounting the biblical story of Abraham and Sarah at the cave of Machpelah, in what is now the West Bank town of Hebron.

``Different Trains,'' a 1990 Grammy-winner for Best Contemporary Composition, incorporated interviews with his governess, a retired Pullman porter and Holocaust survivors to juxtapose Reich's youthful memories of traveling cross-country in the 1940s with the experiences of those passengers aboard trains bound for the Nazi death camps.

``I mean it quite literally,'' he said.

``The voice of anyone you speak to is their music. The way I wrote `Different Trains' . . . was as the interviewee spoke, I went in and carefully analyzed the pitch of the vowels in their speech pattern so I could play it at the piano. I wrote it out for the various instruments I was working with, so that every time they say something, their voice is there and the musicians are doubling their speech melodies.

``The music comes out of the natural speech of the people who are being interviewed. Hence, you never strike a false note in that the characters speaking are always at one with their music. They created it. I'm transcribing it.''

Transcribing does not imply detachment. Both pieces are rooted in Reich's Jewish heritage. Asked about his emotional investment, he turns the question around.

``Do you think it has any emotional impact on you?'' he asked. ``Forget about me. If my music doesn't have an emotional impact, you can be sure we wouldn't be having this conversation.

``No records would have been sold and no one would have gone to the concerts and I would have failed a long time ago. The most important part of any music is its emotional effect on people.''

His current project, another music-theater piece entitled ``Three Tales,'' was commissioned for the end of the millennium.

Reich and his wife, the video artist Beryl Korot, chose three icons - the crash of the Hindenburg, the hydrogen bomb test off the Bikini Atoll and the recent cloning of ``Dolly'' the sheep in England - to look at how mankind has come to grips with technology.

The American premiere is set for 1998 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

``It's not just the individual stories we're talking about,'' he said. ``For instance, when the Hindenburg went down, we're also talking about the man who led to Hitler. So we're talking about the first third of the century. When the zeppelin crashed in 1937, no one said, `Let's stop air travel.' They just said, `We're going to go by airplane, we're not going to go by dirigible.'

``Which is to say that in the late 1930s, and throughout the earlier part of the century, the attitude toward technology was unambiguously positive. It was going to make life better in every way. Then, in 1945 with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then Bikini in 1946, people had a very strong scratching of the head. By the time you get to the cloning of the sheep, most of the press is immediately negative.

``So there's been a very big change in attitude toward technology throughout the century. We really want to deal with that and its spiritual and religious underpinnings as well.''

Early in his career, when he worked exclusively with his own ensemble, Reich might have changed the orchestration or kinds of instruments for ensuing performances of a given piece. ``Don't use an E flat clarinet, use a piccolo. That kind of thing,'' he said.

At 60, he's less inclined to tinker, and for reasons other than his fierce perfectionism. It's about moving on.

``In a sense, I also lose interest in it,'' Reich said. ``I'm happy to perform it, but the idea of dealing with it compositionally is over when it's over. Now, it's the agony of the piece I'm working on. That's the challenge. The rest is just history.''

He's the last, however, to discount the merits of getting in front of an audience.

``I've been working with my own ensemble since 1966, and that's musical reality,'' he said. ``(With) the pieces I don't play in, I run the mixing board. So I keep involved with everything I do when I'm on the road.

``I love the musicians I'm working with now. The Theatre of Voices, that's a different kettle of fish. It keeps you tuned into the realities of performance, which always are of primary importance when you're writing music.''

Today, Reich is on what he calls a ``two-way street.'' A pioneer in sampling, it is he who is being sampled. Nor is it the first time.

In the 1970s, David Bowie and Brian Eno tapped his music. Most recently, a snippet of ``Electric Counterpoint,'' Reich's 1987 guitar piece performed by Pat Metheny, showed up on a recording by the British techno group Orb.

``I think it's great,'' he said. ``These guys are in their 20s and they find something interesting here. That's kind of nice.

``When I was younger, I listened to a great deal of John Coltrane. Before that, Miles Davis and the drummer Kenny Clarke. I don't think I would have written what I did write if it wasn't for their music. So it's kind of poetic justice. I'm proud of that. I've learned from the pop side and the pop side has taken from me. That's fair exchange.''

Next month, the Nonesuch label is releasing a 10-CD box set encompassing almost all of Reich's work from 1965 to '95. Listeners will be able to determine for themselves if there has been a kind of linear progression to his career, Point A being 1965's ``It's Gonna Rain.''

Point B is still off on the horizon.

``There is a continuity to be sure, but if you were to take a listen to `Drumming' or `Four Organs,' and then take a listen to `The Desert Music,' you'd notice, I think, rather extreme differences,'' Reich said. ``But if you look at all the points between, then you sort of fill in the blanks . . .

``I'm certainly not writing the kind of music I wrote when I first came to public attention back in the late 1960s, or even the music that was written in the 1970s. But I think there is a continuity between the pieces. I think people have said that, and I would tend to agree with it.''

None of that may be of much help for the novice listener. How would Reich describe his work to someone unfamiliar with it?

``I'd say if you're interested, go to the record store or go to the record library and take a listen. There's nothing I can possibly tell you besides that.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

Graphic

WANT TO GO?

Who: Steve Reich and Musicians with Theatre of Voices, Paul

Hillier, director; part of the Virginia Waterfront International

Arts Festival

When: 8 p.m. Monday

Where: Harrison Opera House, 160 Virginia Beach Blvd., Norfolk

Tickets: $12 to $25 plus service charge; order at 671-8100

Information: 664-6492 KEYWORDS: THE VIRGINIA WATERFRONT INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL

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