CONVERSATIONS

Artists in various disciplines share their thoughts on and with one of the most celebrated contemporary composers.

In this collection of transcripts from chats, most of them conducted via Zoom in 2020 and 2021, figures including sculptor Richard Serra, Kronos Quartet founder David Harrington, and composer Julia Wolfe share insights into minimalist composer Reich’s works, including It’s Gonna Rain, Electric Counterpoint, and Double Sextet, the last of which garnered Reich the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music. While most conversations focus primarily on Reich (b. 1936), the book is strongest when there’s a genuine dialogue between composers, as when Reich and Stephen Sondheim discuss similarities in their work during a 2015 moderated chat (“we share a fondness for the same harmonic structures,” Sondheim says) or when Nico Muhly describes the ways in which Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and a motet by William Byrd influenced his No Uncertain Terms. Conversations in which little is learned of the other participant’s output lack the depth of other exchanges. Even there, however, the shoptalk is a thrill to read. Reich fans will develop a greater appreciation of his music, with sections on his mastery of the use of tape loops, his innovations in phase music, the rehearsals for Drumming, and the use of strings in parallel with recorded voices in Different Trains. Those new to Reich will discover an eclectic composer who has drawn from sources as disparate as electronic devices made at Bell Labs in the 1960s and the music of 12th-century French composer Pérotin to create the hypnotic Four Organs. Conversations with conductors Michael Tilson Thomas and David Robertson are particularly rich thanks to their enthusiasm and expansiveness and the depth of technical detail—especially when Robertson speaks about conducting Reich’s Tehillim, The Desert Music, and other pieces and Thomas discusses the near-riot Reich’s Four Organscaused at Carnegie Hall in 1973.

A rewarding journey through the career of one of the pioneers of minimalist music.