American Invasion: Reich Reverberations at the Barbican
[Ed. Note: Composer and NewMusicBox correspondent Missy Mazzoli has flown her Brooklyn coop to catch this past weekend’s marathon celebration of Steve Reich at the Barbican Centre. She’ll be posting more about the festival, and offer a back-stage look at the proceedings, in the coming days. Here’s just a taste of what we can expect to get things rolling.]
See also:
- American in London: The Influence of Steve Reich, Part 1
- American in London: The Influence of Steve Reich, Part 2
- Video Gallery: Mazzoli interviews participants in the Barbican’s celebration of Steve Reich.
It’s my first trip to London in nearly a decade and within two hours I’ve become hopelessly lost in a tangle of charmingly-named streets (Fox and Knot Street, Birdcage Walk and Limeburner Lane, to name a few). London is New York twisted into a Mobius strip, a city full of fast walkers holding cigarettes and coffee, throngs of jet-lagged Americans who you can instantly identify by their inability to look the right way when crossing the street, and a surprisingly large number of old-school street preachers. In Oxford Circus Station one of them shouted to a rush-hour crowd “It’s COMING! This is the BEGINNING!”, an almost comically prophetic introduction to a weekend of concerts celebrating the life, work and influence of Steve Reich.
My goal in coming to London is to get closer to an idea of what the true impact of Reich’s music will be on the younger generation. My sense is that, like the influence of the greatest composers, it goes beyond the superficial or even the sonic, and that the composers who, at first listen, sound nothing like Reich are the ones who are the most profoundly influenced by him. The Steve Reich “sound” goes beyond the interlocking patterns or the shimmering orchestrations; Reich’s philosophy, his way of looking at the world, are just as powerful and influential. He has often claimed that the combination of classical and popular style, a much-discussed (and overworked) topic, is a return to normalcy, citing Bartok, Stravinsky, and Weill as composers who incorporated the vernacular into their music. He rejects the term “minimalism,” emphasizing that what is interesting is the differences between the so-called minimalists. The diversity of this weekend’s programming proves this point; it’s a one-of-a-kind festival that extends beyond a retrospective and takes a look at a potential future.