At 90, Steve Reich continues to find inspiration in music

As one of the most prominent contemporary American composers, Steve Reich has spent more than 60 years writing minimalist music that uses pulse and repetition to define subtle shifts – a catalogue of work that has altered classical music’s conception of rhythm and structure and influenced popular artists such as David Bowie and Radiohead.

In his latest composition, “In All Your Ways,” an 18-minute instrumental work that premiered in August at the Edinburgh International Festival ahead of his 90th birthday celebrations, on Oct.3, Reich explores new territory. Speaking with Reuters from New York, he discusses the piece, the impact of AI on music and how he thinks about – and composes – his work. The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

To start, can you walk us through your creative process? How did it unfold with “In All Your Ways”?

When I start any piece, and “In All Your Ways” was the same, I try to map out the harmonic structure. That goes back to when I wrote “Music For 18 Musicians” (in the 1970s), and so in this case, I came up with all those in terms of key signatures: three sharps, one flat, five flats, and no sharps or flats. But having done that a lot, I just felt, you know, enough already. Let’s cut some new ground here. (“In All Your Ways”) was the result. I also have recently started structuring the pieces in terms of note value, rhythmic values. I wrote a good chunk of the piece, way more than half, and I said, “It’s fast. It’s too fast. It’s got to slow down and really, catch its breath.”

So I decided I would insert slow movements into what I already had to give that breather space, which I’ve never done. A lot of composers put movements in, movements out. Me personally, I start at the beginning, go to the end. If I hit a hitch in the middle, I try to solve the problem that I’m facing at that moment. But it’s always movement forward. This was going into an almost completed piece and doing surgery. It was exciting to do something that I hadn’t done before. It was a challenge, and I think the solutions to that worked very well.

At almost 90, what still genuinely piques your curiosity about material you are working on? What immediately bores you?

If a piece starts to bore me, I trash it. I have a lot of trashed pieces. (laughs) About a year before the music “In All Your Ways,” I just floundered around doing garbage – little sketches of it are in my music notebooks, which are all going to go off to my archive in Switzerland. That’s something that I think every composer faces. Some people are just naturally fast composers. So in my case, I work harder. There are several pieces I have that were just good enough, but it’s really it should be something that comes from within you while you’re working.

“In All Your Ways,” the idea of inserting movements while I’m composing, I just never even remotely thought about doing it, and there was no need to do it. But there I was doing it myself because I felt it had to be done because of an intuitive feeling that the music was moving too fast all the time. So that’s my most intimate, real experience of that phenomena, and everything else to be kind of theoretical.

Outside of a concert hall, is there a preferred way you would like people to listen to your music?

I have never given it a thought in my life. I just want them to like it. And if they don’t, well, I can’t win them all.

Reuters