IDAGIO Meets ... Steve Reich

This new album is the first time all three of your string quartets have been recorded together. How did this project come about?

I think it was because the Mivos Quartet wanted to do it, I’m happy to say. They invited me to come to rehearsals and coach them. I did that about a year ago and it was a pleasure working with them! Lots and lots of quartets have played this music but this is the first collection and they’ve done it beautifully.

I have to ask about the quote in the liner notes of the album: “I never expected to write a string quartet”. Could you explain why and also, how did you come to write these string quartets in the end?

The string quartet as you know consists of two violins, one viola and one cello and since many many years one of the basic techniques that I’ve been interested in is using identical instruments: Two pianos, violins, what have you; identical instruments playing in canon, playing rounds against each other, and this has been going on since way back in the 1960s. So a string quartet has two violins, fine! But it only has one viola and one cello. So what occurred to me was to treat the string quartet as one unified reality – which of course it is – and have more than one string quartet, either live or prerecorded. And that opened up the door to working with quartets, or you could also say the small strings of an orchestra, and in this way the instruments were an ideal collection for me that I'm very comfortable working with. That’s why you have these pieces that all really work with three string quartets, one live and two prerecorded. Triple Quartet is the one that can be done all live and has been done occasionally as a live piece.

You’ve mentioned that the musicians are required to pre-record material and then play along to that. Isn’t that quite challenging?

Not really, no. It’s not 1750, it’s 2023! Most musicians have multitrack recorders built into their laptops and especially during the pandemic a lot of people have been combining live and pre-recorded material because it was impossible to play concerts. But this has been going on for at least fifty years and it started in Europe with Stockhausen and his generation. When Kronos did the quartets at first, they made their own pre-recordings, they were playing against recordings of themselves, so all the material was Kronos. Now, for many performances of this piece by other quartets, they would rent the pre-recorded material from Boosey & Hawkes, my music publisher, and then all these other quartets played against the Kronos pre-recording. But if a quartet is really serious about the piece and they want to put it in their repertoire, like the Mivos Quartet, then they make their own pre-recording – which is actually a lot of work in the studio – and then they’re playing against themselves. That’s what you have on the new Deutsche Grammophon recordings: Every note you hear is Mivos Quartet and so it becomes their personal interpretation of all three different parts. Playing live against a pre-recorded part is made easier if it’s a pre-recording of themselves, because you know the way it’s been done.

Both “Different Trains” and “WTC 9/11” are based on speech samples, and recordings of speech have been a major factor in your work since very early tape pieces like “It’s Gonna Rain”. First, could you talk about what fascinates you about speech as musical material?

Well, I think all great composers have been interested in speech. Languages determine musical style on a national basis: If we think of French, Italian, German and American music, it’s often tied to the language. I’m thinking now of the great Czech composer Janáček, who used to walk around Prague with a music notebook writing down not just what people said but how they said it, their speech melody, and that found its way into his operas so that the melodies in the operas are based on Czech speech patterns. Or think of Steven Sondheim, the American composer of incredible musical theatre: Again, his writing comes out of the way we Americans speak. He has a line in one of his songs: “And a hundred different people just got off of the train” – 12-1234-1234-123-1 …[laughs] Once you say, “a hundred different people just got off of the train,” the music is there already! So this is not something that I invented. When I studied with Luciano Berio – one of my best teachers – he was working on a number of pieces, one of which was basically a text by James Joyce read out loud by Berio’s wife Cathy Berberian, a wonderful singer. Berio would record her and then chop up the speech recording into little phonemes, which was exactly what James Joyce’s book was about. So in a time of electronic music, the source of Berio’s work was not electronics, it was human speech. I remember that while I was a student of Berio’s, he played for us two recordings of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s, the first one was Electronic Studies and the other one was Gesang der Jünglinge. And I thought to myself: “Gesang der Jünglinge, that’s the one!” And why is it the one? Because of the kid’s voice! So very early on, I became aware that I was not interested in electronic music, I was interested in working with speech as the source of what was called either “Musique concrète” or “Tape Music”. It's Gonna Rain and Come Out was recordings of Black Americans whose voice is very melodic, and it is the melody of the speech that forms the basis of the piece. And the same thing in Different Trains and in WTC 9/11, only here the speech is picked up and imitated by the string quartet, whose tuning is constantly refined and pitched to the speech. Actually in rehearsals both with Kronos and with Mivos, how to double the voice was a very big question – how do you get the feeling of the speech with the bowing that you use. They would ask me, “Do you want us to play the notation or listen to the voice and imitate the voice?” I said, “Absolutely imitate the voice, use the notation as a beginning point and then if you can do better than that, please do!” And of course that’s exactly what they did.

© Jake Blakesberg

“Different Trains” uses incredibly powerful voice recordings. How did you find them and how did you choose these specific voice samples? 

The first movement of Different Trains is “America Before the War”. One of the voices is the voice of my governess Virginia Mitchell, who took care of me: My parents were divorced, that’s why I was on the trains, visiting my singer-songwriter mother in Los Angeles and then going back to my attorney father in New York City. The woman who was with me, who was really like my mother, was Virginia. So I recorded her to begin with and then on the trains there were always the Black American Pullman porters, the people who took care of you while you were on the train. I found a retired elderly Pullman porter, Lawrence Davis, and I went down to Washington DC in the 1980s and recorded him. These are the voices that I grew up with. In the second movement, with the Holocaust survivors, I went up to an archive of Holocaust survivor recordings at Yale University and I listened to lots and lots of different recordings. I chose ones which I thought were very powerful in terms of what they were saying and also melodic in nature – some speakers are just naturally very melodic and others are very stiff and monotone, so I chose a combination of what was said and how it was said.

“WTC 9/11” marks a return to working with documentary material and speech samples, right? Could you tell us about the genesis of that work?

Well, for twenty-five years my wife and I lived four blocks from Ground Zero. When 9/11 happened we were actually up in Vermont, but my son and granddaughter were in our apartment in New York. So at 8:30 in the morning, the phone rang and it was our son saying “I think they bombed the World Trade Center again,” because terrorists had bombed the WTC before. We turned on the television immediately when he called and we saw the plane hit the second building. I was terrified because there was no way of knowing that the building wouldn't fall over sideways. In fact it just crumbled straight down but if it had fallen over to the side anywhere near the direction my son was living, it would have killed him and everybody else in that building. So it was a terrifying situation for me personally and my wife. It had a very powerful effect. So ten years later, Kronos came back to me and said “Would you write us another string quartet?” I had written Triple Quartet, which does not use voices, but they said, “Maybe you could use voices again?” So I said, “Fine!” [laughs]. This is ten years later, but I began thinking, “Wait a minute! I have unfinished business. I want to go back and revisit this powerful experience that I went through.” So then I started making recordings of great friends of mine, the composer David Lang and other people that I know, who had been taking their children to school that day when the planes flew over their heads. I also got recordings from the New York City Fire Department, of the incredibly heroic firemen who climbed the stairs to find people to save – it was a doomed mission and of course they all died. So it was a very emotional situation. The first movement of the piece is just the voices of the New York City Fire Department and the air traffic controllers who were monitoring the flights of these planes and could see they were going in the wrong direction. The first plane was going from Boston to Los Angeles, and to do that, you have to go west, but this plane started to go south, because New York is south of Boston. So the air traffic controllers said, “He’s going south, he’s going the wrong way.” And the second movement are the voices of my friends talking about what happened to them on the day.

And once you have these speech recordings, can you take us through the process of working with them?

Again, when I chose the material for Different Trains and WTC 9/11, I was listening for what is said and how it is said. In the case of Different Trains, I felt that I was not going to be able to change the pitch of the recordings. You can put a recording in the computer and change the pitch, but in Different Trains, I thought that was a moral mistake, an immoral thing to do because these were people who are Holocaust survivors and who was I to change their voices?! It felt like a very ugly thing to do and I didn't do it. So what I had to do was listen to their speech melody and to write it down as it was in musical notation and then figure out what would be the order of the speech patterns to make sense of the “story” of what was going on. At the same time, in Different Trains they were in different keys so to speak and in different tempos. People don’t speak in the same tempo – so I had to figure out a way in the performance of the musicians being able to go from one tempo to another tempo. As the tempos are not related, it isn’t like going from eighth note to quarter note or from quarter note to half note, it’s 1/24 to 1/32 [laughs]. The only way to make those kinds of changes is for the musicians to pre-record each section separately so you get the proper tempos and then on the live performance, when the live players move from the end of one voice they were playing with to the next, they stop playing. Because the pre-recorded quartet starts playing, doubling the speech which had been worked out in the recording studio, and then after about two, three, four bars, they [the live performers] join in. When you’re playing it live, it’s not difficult to do: You play, and then a new tempo is established and once it’s established, then you join in. In WTC 9/11, I did change the voices so I could get the exact pitch that I wanted and the exact tempo that I wanted because I thought: “Now this time: Prima la musica!” This time I wanted to be able to get a different character because I don't change tempo all the time. So there’s a difference between the two pieces but the experience in live performance in both pieces is that the players simply play, they don’t need headphones, they don’t need special material, they just perform.

You’ve already touched upon the subject of rhythm and how speech dictates rhythm. The press text mentions that Triple Quartet was “influenced by the pulsating rhythms that propel the final movement of Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4.” Could you tell us more about Bartók’s influence on your string quartets?

Well, Different Trains and WTC 9/11 have nothing to do with Béla Bartók – nothing! But Triple Quartet has a great deal to do with Béla Bartók! Because Triple Quartet is just music, there’s no speech whatsoever. When I was a student at Juilliard School New York one of the things that interested me the most were Béla Bartók’s string quartets. Particularly the Fourth Quartet – it’s extremely rhythmically intense, a very intense piece! And that intensity is something that I admired and wanted to achieve in my own musical language. So there is definitely a relation, and there are other influences of Bartók in my music: Bartók’s use in the Fourth Quartet of a five movement form where the first and the last movement have the same tempo, the second and fourth have the same tempo and the third movement in the middle is unique using the slow movement – a lot of pieces of mine like Sextet and even the Desert Music are influenced by that kind of formal layout. But in these string quartets the one that is influenced by Bartók is the triple quartet for sure and it’s not just the rhythm. It’s everything! It’s the use of the instruments, it’s the pitch, it's the notes, it's the melodic movement, and it's the rhythm. Everything!

Steve Reich: The String Quartets is out on IDAGIO now.