The Reich stuff

The sampling of a minimalist composer

by Douglas Wolk

The pinging riff of the Orb's "Little Fluffy Clouds," the polyphonic chimes of Coldcut's "Music 4 No Musicians," and the chilling voice at the beginning of the "Bruise Blood Remix" of Tortoise's "Djed" all have something in common that you wouldn't necessarily expect from pop musicians. They all sample pieces by Steve Reich, a composer from the classical tradition whose early work centers on pulses, cycles, and the repetition of simple patterns. His records have ended up in an awful lot of dance DJs' bins -- and now some of those DJs are returning the favor.

Reich Remixed (Nonesuch) has pieces from 1966's Come Out to 1996's Proverb remixed by an all-star coterie of American, English, and Japanese dance-music types, including Mantronik, Howie B., and Ken Ishii. Most of them limit themselves to a single work, though Tranquillity Bass pulls off a clever "Megamix" incorporating fragments of a slew of Reich standards. What's most intriguing about it is how much respect the mixers have for the originals -- they mostly preserve their basic cadences and feel, augmenting them with a little bit of dance-floor kick. But how did a 63-year-old composer get in with the DJ-culture crowd?

"I was unaware of the scene until six or seven years ago," Reich says, "when I was in London doing an interview, and they said, `What do you think of the Orb?' I said, `What's the Orb?' They said, `We'll give you the CD'. . . the one that had `Little Fluffy Clouds' on it. I said, `Hmm! I recognize that!' " What Reich recognized was a loop from Electric Counterpoint, a solo guitar piece he'd written for Pat Metheny years before. "Since the Orb was not all that successful then, we didn't go after them for money or anything. That upped our stock in the remix world," he jokes.

In a sense, though, Reich had always had a foot in that world. The wave of electronic dance music that began with disco's first extended mixes and flowered with acid house was about using rhythms to preserve a fragile, airy moment as long as possible, and Reich's music specializes in that kind of time-extension. Take Music for 18 Musicians, his 1976 breakthrough, in which marimbas and xylophones beat out a pattering, ceaseless pulse in repeating patterns, set against voices and clarinets whose phrases last as long as their breath holds out, and then begin again. In effect, though not in style, it was startlingly close to the full-length version of Donna Summer's "Love To Love You Baby." The audience that was hearing the irregular patterns of Summer's breath over Giorgio Moroder's sequencers in the discos was very different from the audience that cheered 18 Musicians' debut at Town Hall in New York, but it was inevitable that there would eventually be some crossover thanks to people who found their ideal in form rather than in genre; through the late '70s and '80s, eclectic-minded DJs got turned on to his records for their distinctive rhythms, austerity, and intensity.

A lot of Reich's early work is "system music," in which the composition is generated, at least in part, by some kind of mathematical process. The result may not feel like a techno loop, but the idea behind it is fundamentally similar. Clapping Music, for instance -- a 1972 piece for two pairs of hands -- has a single handclap pattern repeated 12 times as another pattern moves, beat by beat, out of phase with it. System music also lends itself to borrowings and alterations, which Reich doesn't see as a violation of compositional integrity. "There's a great tradition in Western music of picking up on earlier work," he says. "I'm working on a piece called `Three Tales,' about technology in the 20th century. In the Hindenburg episode, there's an absolutely straightforward use of the Nibelung leitmotif from Wagner. I wouldn't call it a remix, since you're dealing with written music, but I think the DJs are doing essentially the same thing, with recording instead of with notation."

Now, more than ever, Reich's compositional methods and his younger fans' are headed toward each other. He was one of the first people from the modern classical tradition to use samplers and computers as tools for writing scores -- and, later, to compose directly on the computer, with the same sorts of software that electronic dance producers use to make their tracks. "Different Trains, from '88, could not have happened without the computer, and more importantly without the sampling keyboard," he admits. "I was never interested in synthesis. I'm interested in a violin, not in something that sounds like a violin or like a piano. But sampling is a whole different thing: you can bring in any sound as if it were a musical instrument. That was definitely for me. . . . Sampling and its implications, like video sampling, have just opened things up, and I think they're going to have a tremendous impact. This is a good virus."