How I Learned to Love Steve Reich: Quality in Arts, and Arts Education

It happened again the other day: an assistant principal I know asked me about a conversation she had with one her music teachers. The conversation focused on whether or not a particular artist that the assistant principal was fond of was an artist of quality. The music teacher didn’t think so. It was cause for the assistant principal to wonder who own and defines quality in the arts. Is it something that’s based in style or genre? Is it about individual works? Is classical music or jazz better than rap? For some the questions are old hat. For others, they are important and essential questions as one begins to think more deeply about arts education, and well, arts and culture in general.

So, it was cause for me to repost a blog entry about the composer Steve Reich. Okay, I was waiting for an excuse…

Enjoy!
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Last week I was talking with a middle school principal in one of CAE’s programs. A partnership school network planning meeting was concluding and we got to talking about quality. At first, I thought he was asking about quality arts instruction, as in “how do you support and measure it?” It’s the sort of question you want principals to ask. Very quickly the conversation went to a deeper, more interesting, and entirely affirming place: “how can you tell quality in art?”

It’s the mother lode.

It’s the conversation in education you point towards, hope for, far beyond the technicalities of a school principal administering an arts education program.

We got to talking about the age old issue of works that have passed the test of time, graduating to that of masterpiece, as opposed to  newer works often by living artists, that are rejected outright or overlooked by those who are guided by the magical canon of masterworks.

We talked for a while about the length of time it took for Mahler’s works to enter the mainstream, ultimately becoming accepted by audiences as masterpieces. These works, written at the turn of the 20th century, took a good 70 years or more to enter the classical canon. For most of these years, Mahler was relatively obscure.

We talked about Bach all but disappearing until Mendelssohn resurrected his works (Mahler pun intended) among classical music enthusiasts of the 19th century.

We talked about the people who still question Jackson Pollock. We talked about Buster Keaton, and the many years his body of works languished, until James Agee’s 1949 Life Magazine piece put Buster’s genius back on track with the American public.

It all got me to thinking about how I learned to love Steve Reich.

The vast majority of Western music has a similar architecture or design. It’s there in a Strauss opera, as well as a great song by Gershwin or even a phrase of Woody Guthrie. The music of Steve Reich does not make use of that architecture. Its influence comes from Africa. It has a steady pulse, and phrases that appear to be repeating themselves, over and over. Reich describes it as ‘pulsitile.” In fact, these repeating phrases contain small, almost imperceptible changes that alter the music subtly over time. I would argue that if you can hear these changes, than you really aren’t taking the music in.

Steve Reich on “pulsitile”: Well, thirty years ago I had just returned to New York City from San Francisco. Basically, John Cage was the most important thing in town; Morton Feldman was active; The younger people were James Tenney and Phil Corner and Malcolm Goldstein, and Charles Wuorinen. At that time, the American composers were either under the “downtown” influence of John Cage or the “uptown” influence of Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio
and company. But the sad fact is that musically, everybody was under
the influence of music that was not “pulsitile,” [not with a regular
beat]. You can’t tap your foot to either Boulez or John Cage, nor could
you know where you were tonally. The idea of cadence, any sense of tonal

center, melody in any sense of the word –including even some Schoenberg–

was pretty hard to put your ear on. So I felt sort of out of it and very much alone.

Are you still with me?  Okay, here’s the deal: Reich’s music does not employ the narrative that is prototypical to most Western music. If you’re looking for the building of phrase, harmony, rhythm to an emotional peak, well, you won’t find it in Reich’s music. If you’re listening for that Western narrative, you are SOL. You will find something else which asks you to receive the music in a different way.

In the mid-eighties, one of my dearest friends, freelance trumpeter Terry Szor, gave me a cassette of Music for Eighteen Musicians. He told me: “it changed my life.” It’s the turn of a phrase I have heard spoken about Reich’s music so very, very often. So, I tried it on for size; I hated it.

I was listening for that Western narrative. In arts education, artists and teacher often work with the parallels between the architecture of sentences and paragraphs in literature (English Language Arts) and music. Naturally, settings of literary works to music, such as Schubert lieder, reinforce this relationship. That being said, if you were to compare Reich’s music, or Coltrane’s Interstellar Space  or Sun Ship to such literary works, you might not know where to start. I chose these examples because Reich was influenced by the later, “experimental” works of John Coltrane, which are rarely mentioned against Coltrane’s more traditional works, such as the beloved Blue Train or My Favorite Things.

God, this is a long blog….I hope you’ll read it!

So, here I was listening with my Western ears, getting supremely bored (Coltrane pun intended), increasingly annoyed, and I quickly bailed, wondering what exactly was wrong with my friend Terry. Years later, after I finally learned to love Steve Reich, I played a recording of Drumming for another close friend, who got mad, I mean really mad, and instructed me in no uncertain terms to turn it off, immediately! At first I thought she was kidding, and laughed. It was not well received, to say the least.

The first time I recall really learning to love Reich’s music was at a dance performance. There was something about following the dance, the visual aspect, that allowed me to take the music in, in an entirely different way. I wasn’t listening for a certain progression, a certain phrase, a certain architecture–all the things I had been trained to listen for in music, but instead I felt the music, received it–allowed it to wash over me. Watching the dance made it possible. It was as if a switch was flipped: the override switch to shut off my Western trained musical mind.

This letting go of my intellectual ear, my thinking ear, perhaps better put, led me to a place where the music created a feeling that I could only describe as euphoric and trance-like, if, and only if I really gave in to it. Time and space sort of stopped, and I connected with the genius of Steve Reich. I learned to love Steve Reich.

It’s what makes this question of quality difficult to answer in the simple way that an educator might like. Not to mention the question of assessing knowledge. Can’t we create a rubric for this? The rubric of genius! How could it be that I moved along a continuum of experience and learning to evolve from someone who wanted Reich’s music stopped, to someone who experienced a physical euphoria while listening to the work, wishing the music would never stop?

And, this isn’t limited to Reich. To this day, I hear from the people who tell me that John Cage’s genius is for his “ideas,” not his music. Oh really?

I want to tie this back to education. Arts education, as well as education in general. The complexity of this matter, the kaleidoscope of quality, in so many ways speaks to the complexity of teaching and learning, and of course, how we evaluate, test, measure, and establish systems of accountability.

Is Andy Warhol genius or charlatan? Is Reich a genius or a bee buzzing your tower? Can standardized testing ever be an effective measure for understanding a complex world of teaching, learning, and human development? Perhaps when that task force or administrator gives us our rubric of genius we will know for sure. And for those who think I am kidding, believe me, that rubric is being worked on somewhere, someplace.

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For those interested:

here’s a link to me interviewing Reich in 1998.

And here’s a link to Reich interviewing me (really!)