It's been a long time since the Israeli music scene has been part of anything so exciting. To celebrate his 70th birthday, American composer Steve Reich has been traveling all over the globe to attend performances of his work, pick up a string of awards, and meet with musicians and audiences. A visit to this country would seem only natural, considering Reich's long-standing connection to Israel, but someone had to be wise enough to figure that out.

Thankfully, someone was. Music director and producer Avigail Arnheim initiated and, together with the Jerusalem Music Center, which is handling the operational side of the program, organized, on short notice, the visit of one of the trailblazers of 20th-century music.

On Wednesday and Thursday, 50 outstanding Israeli musicians met with Reich and performed his music in workshops and master classes at Tel Aviv University's Mehta-Buchman School of Music. Later on Thursday, Reich appeared at a roundtable discussion that was also open to the general public.

	Advertisement

On Saturday night, Tel Aviv Museum is hosting a gala concert in his honor: Reich himself will open the concert with his duet "Clapping Music." This will be followed by "Sextet," "Duo" and his masterful quartet "Different Trains." The concert will end with an Israeli debut of his new work "You Are (Variations)," featuring vocalists, woodwind, percussion and strings, and four pianos. Noam Tzur, the young Israeli conductor who was recently hired as assistant to conductor Pierre Boulez, will preside over this musical feast.

In a phone call from his New York apartment before his arrival, Reich said this intensive schedule would not leave him much time for other activities in Israel. "At most I may spend a Shabbat with Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz," he said. Reich has been to Israel before. In 1977, he came to record the cantillations - the special melodies used for reading the Torah - of Yemenite, Kurdistani and Iraqi Jews. He appeared with his ensemble in the 1980s, and later composed "The Cave" here. He visited again in 2000.

"On my first trip to Israel, I was well on my way to becoming a ba'al tshuva," he said, using the Hebrew term for the newly observant.

Two years ago, at his home in New York, Reich spoke about the process of becoming religious. "You see this?" he asked, pointing to the hat that has since become his trademark. "It hides my kippah. I still don't have the guts to show it to the world." To prove it, he pulled off the hat and bowed low to show off the small black skullcap perched on his head.

"It all began in the 1960s. Like many people at that time, I was into hatha yoga. I did it for 10 years, but then, God knows, I began to feel something was missing. I tried all kinds of things connected to Judaism - learning Hebrew, for example. But then I began to think: What's the point of all this if there's no practical side to it? At first I observed mitzvot [religious commandments] selectively, and then I started keeping Shabbat. That was the turning point. But the truth is, it came naturally, because there was no conflict with the Eastern philosophies I'd been dabbling in, which also say that human beings need a 24-hour rest period once a week."

Reich's Judaism is an important key to understanding his creative process, which has evolved over the years, from the repetitive style that changed the face of music in the last third of the 20th century, to his current work on Jewish themes. One of them is "You Are (Variations)" - one of the major draws of tomorrow night's concert.

He dropped the word 'always'

Reich's inspiration for this work is a saying by Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, which is also attributed to the rabbi's great-grandfather, the Baal Shem Tov: "Bamakom she'hoshev hasekhel, sham kol ha'adam." Reich translates it as: "You are wherever your thoughts are."

The second part of the work, sung in Hebrew, is based on a verse from the Book of Psalms: "Shiviti hashem lenegdi" ("I place the Eternal before me"). Reich says he left out the last word, tamid (always), because boasting that God was always before his eyes would be untrue. Part 3 is a text by Wittgenstein set to music, and Part 4 goes back to Hebrew, with an adage from "Pirkei Avot" ("Ethics of the Fathers"): "Emor me'at ve'aseh harbay" ("Say little and do much").

"In English it sounds great," says Reich. "Very Clint Eastwood-y. But musically it's terrible, because the word 'much' is short and clipped, whereas in Hebrew, 'harbay' sounds like a lot."

"Harbaaaaay ..." he says to demonstrate, dragging out the last syllable.

How do you write music for Hebrew texts?

Reich: "First of all, I make sure that I understand every word. Whenever you set text to music, no matter who wrote it or what language it's in, your inspiration comes from the words, and from understanding every shade of meaning, not just the literal meaning. After that, intuition comes into it, and knowledge. In [Reich's work] 'Tehillim,' for example, I could never have written the music for 'Hashamayim mesaprim kvod el' ('the heavens declare the glory of God') if I wasn't such a Bartok fan, and if I'd never heard Stravinsky's 'Adoration of the Earth' in the 'Rite of Spring.'"

So you use a lot of "tone painting" in your work?

"Tone painting has been around since we lived in caves. It goes back to the age-old desire of composers to be faithful to the lyrics. You see tone painting in Bach. In Bob Dylan, too. And Schubert."

Great discovery

Steve Reich discovered the great music that influenced him so profoundly - the early medieval composers, and Bartok and Debussy in the 20th century - relatively late in life. "Until the age of 14, I never heard music composed either before 1750 or after Wagner," he relates. "And then a friend introduced me to the 'Rite of Spring,' and Bach's 5th Brandenburg concerto, and Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. It was like someone opened the door and said 'Come in, there's a room here you've never been in.'"

Reich studied percussion and deliberated whether or not to go into composing. But he had great teachers who encouraged him, among them musicologist William Austin, composer Luciano Berio, and he was a friend-colleague of Thelonious Monk, with whom he studied jazz.

Reich's music was a reaction to the avant-garde music of the time. "In the 1960s," he explains, "there was only one way to compose. You could give it two names: Stockhausen-Boulez or John Cage. You weren't allowed to have a steady rhythm or elements that repeated themselves. You couldn't have a clear melody or a 'harmonic center.' Musical politics was such a powerful force that even a giant like Igor Stravinsky surrendered, and Aaron Copland stopped composing altogether."

Reich, along with composers like Philip Glass, La Monte Young and Terry Riley, began to write repetitive music, later dubbed "minimalist," taking their cue from the visual art of the time. The idea was to introduce subtle changes in rhythmic, melodic music over an extended period of time in such a way that the music underwent a metamorphosis and turned into something different almost without noticing. Two groundbreaking pieces of minimalist music were "Come Out" and "It's Gonna Rain," which were created with a tape recorder.

So this style that you and your colleagues developed back then was revolutionary?

"I would call it restoration, not revolution. It was restoring harmony, bringing back counterpoint and melody, but in a very different context."

Melody, harmony - so you mean Romantic?

"No. Neo-Romanticism comes from other sources, from Mahler and the composers of his day. Anyway, what I care about is whether the music works. Definitions don't matter. In the end, only the good music remains from each stylistic period."

Minimalism has influenced many styles of music the world over. One can even hear its echoes in trance, rap and hip-hop. As I told Reich, I was at a pizza stand in Tel Aviv the other day, with trance music blaring at full volume, when all of a sudden I heard snatches of "Come Out." In shock, I pointed to the loudspeaker and shouted to the guy behind the counter "Hey! That's Steve Reich!"

Reich wasn't even surprised by my story. He told me about "Reich Remixed."

"I let them put out a CD as long as they paid me royalties," he said with a laugh. "The producer went to American, British, Japanese and German DJs, and remixes started pouring in from all over the world. A panel selected which ones got in and which ones didn't."

The final product: Electronic DJ trance that combines party sound and the music that prefigured it - works like "Music for 18 Musicians," "Drumming" and "Piano Phase."

"What I liked is that even though I'm not part of the musical world of these kids, my music spoke to them. The same way that a journalist or an author likes to know that someone reads what they write, I like to know that people are listening to me."