Steve Reich
Tehillim
Steve Reich’s early years as a bi-coastal child of divorced parents in New York and California led to a bi-coastal musical education as well. He began studying music seriously at 14, when he first heard the music of Bach and Stravinsky, and also studied drums with Roland Kohloff to learn to play jazz. He attended Cornell University as an undergraduate, earning a degree in philosophy, not music, but then moved on to Julliard in 1957 to study composition with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti. He earned his graduate degree in California, at Mills College in Oakland, where he worked with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud.
Although he first experimented in 12-tone composition, Reich soon learned that what interested him most were the rhythmic variations he could create. In the mid-60’s he started creating looped tapes of phrases that he would repeat and layer on top of each other, allowing the fragments to grow more and more out of sync until the words were reduced to their rhythmic and tonal patterns. His earliest works in this mode include It’s Gonna Rain (1965), fragments of a Pentecostal street preacher’s sermon, and Come Out (1966), a single phrase by a survivor of a race riot. In 1967 he achieved a similar effect in a piece for live performance, Piano Phases, which requires two pianists to play the same musical figure in unison and then gradually phase out of sync until they are a 16th beat apart. This work also demonstrates Reich’s standing as one of the founding members of the school of minimalism, a musical style that features repetitive melodic lines that weave around a tonal center.
From his earliest works, Reich has also been interested in depicting social issues in music. In the 70’s he began taking classes in the Torah with his fiancé, video artist Beryl Korot, as well as studying the music of Jewish cantillation (chants sung by cantors during services). These studies led to compositions such as Different Trains (1988), which uses recordings of an American railroad worker, holocaust survivors, and his former nanny to contrast the trains he rode as a child during World War II travelling between New York and California, and the trains fellow Jews would have ridden in Europe at the same time, shuttled to concentration camps.
His interest in his Jewish heritage also led to Tehillim (1981). Its title is the Hebrew word for psalms, and it sets verses from psalms 19, 34, 18, and 150 for three sopranos and an alto with, originally, a chamber group and percussion. Reich later set the work for full orchestra as well. Although this work, like his earlier compositions, features repeating phrases and sonic layers, its setting of longer lines of text lead to much more extensive melodies than heard in some of those early works. Because Reich based the rhythmic meter of the piece on the rhythm of the Hebrew text as it is spoken, there is no fixed meter and the work is one of extreme rhythmic complexity. Composer and conductor John Adams has said that Tehillimis the most difficult work he has ever conducted. According to Reich, the work also does not owe much to his study of cantillation; he writes that “the oral tradition for Psalm singing in the Western synagogues has been lost. This meant I was free to compose the melodies for Tehillim without a living oral tradition to imitate or ignore.”
The first movement, Part I, opens with a single soprano voice and percussion, and slowly builds as more voices and instruments are added. While lower timbre instruments play sustained notes, the percussion and vocal lines are in almost constant motion, perhaps depicting the final phrase, “their [the heavens’] line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.” This movement segues directly into Part II, whose melody features the alto voice more strongly, but continues the same basic tempo and propulsive motion of the previous movement. Solos for woodwinds echo some of the patterns sung by the vocalists.
There is a brief pause before Part III, the only slow movement in the work. Two voices, the lower one echoed by oboe, intertwine sinuously over an ostinato by the marimba and vibraphone. As before, more voices and instruments are layered over this opening melody, including pulsing chords and melodic phrases for strings. We then segue directly into Part IV, a song of praise where the percussion builds to include, in contrast to the “clashing cymbals” of the lyric, heavenly chimes from the crotales.