Steve Reich Rocks New York

Last Saturday, I had the pleasure of witnessing a live performance of Music for 18 Musicians, by Steve Reich, at Carnegie Hall. The occasion was the weeklong observance of Steve's 70th birthday, which is being celebrated by musicians and music-lovers around the globe. Steve is one of the most important modern composers in the world: he revolutionized jazz and rock'n'roll and he laid the foundation for modern electronica by anticipating the primal forces of pulse, sound, and live performance.

Saturday night was the penultimate performance, with guitar legend Pat Metheny opening, Kronos Quartet following, all leading up to the performance of Music for 18 Musicians, with Steve directing the show. It was one of the toughest tickets to come by that I've ever seen in New York City, and everyone who was there will never forget it.

There is simply no one like Steve Reich.

Through hard work, sheer guts, and brilliant jazz, Steve taught the world a new way of listening to music. A different way. In a sense, he opened a door to a new, a profoundly anti-establishment way of perceiving reality. Steve co-opted to the nominal structures of modernity, and then, by infusing them with the soul of a stoic New Yorker - borne on the gritty streets of lower Manhattan in the '70's - created a wholly fresh audio concept - a concept celebrated by a five-minute standing ovation from the rapt, sold out audience at Carnegie Hall. During the entire hour-long performance, few in the packed house dared to breathe, let alone move a muscle.

Music for 18 Musicians may be the most important piece of music composed by an American composer in the last 30 years. Layers of unfolding phrasing gradually emerge, slowly revealing the nature of harmonic reality inherent in the natural world. Two artists who come to mind when contemplating Steve's importance to modern music are Andy Goldsworthy, who showed how order can be found in the natural world by humans, and Bach, who demonstrated that through hard work, persistence and focus, humans can tap into the pre-existing - pre-ontological - sonic framework. The bedrock of simple harmonics taken to logical extremes, like a never-ending fractal of music.

Fractals come to mind when listening to Steve's music, which has been described as abstract, geometric, and minimalist by humans trying to come to grips with the reality that dawns upon you when you listen it. But what many have failed to grasp is the unmistakable warmth, soul, and jazz sensibility that pervades the music. It's almost like the teacher who, through discipline, repetition and vision, punishes you, until you finally understand that understanding takes no effort at all: it is just being. Steve shows us how the tools of modernity - mathematics, geometry, and architecture - can be turned inside out and infused with life. Anyone who has experienced Koyanisqaatsi and its soundtrack by Steve's buddy Philip Glass, knows what this is about. This is the essence of creative genius: the ability to take existing structures and blow them apart. Creative destruction, some might call it. Just call it Steve Reich.

Steve has been accurately called an avatar of technology. It's not just that he used tapes, loops and samples before anyone else. It's the way he used them - in a subtle, understated, restrained, yet deeply felt way - observant of structure, but never overbearing. Contrast that with the "pound me 'till I can't take no more" aesthetic of the modern pop scene, a barren wasteland from which subtlety, reflection, and a longer-than-4-minute attention span has apparently been banished. In a way, Steve is the antidote for the noxious popular music currently hypnotizing the American public. "Big ballin'" rappers who weren't born when Steve wrote Music for 18 Musicians owe him a debt of gratitude - if they can ever take their minds off petty "snatch the necklace" games and juvenile parking garage shootouts. The entire concept of modern rhythm, or sampling beats, of ordering club tracks, or tapping into the elemental consciousness of the dance floor, runs directly through Steve Reich. And yet this humble, unassuming man is uninterested in the machinations of the modern pop melee. Anonymous, yet one of us; all around us, unseen, yet omnipresent.

Experiencing Music for 18 Musicians live, especially from the front row of Tier 2 at Carnegie Hall looking down from right on top of the stage, is an earth-shattering experience. Eighteen humans, drawn together in inter-locking patterns and forms of music - with a fierce, though inexplicably relaxed, intensity, and a dedication to honor and show the genius of the man who created this music. Eighteen humans, all clad in white shirts and black pants: some singing, some playing stringed instruments, some playing brass instruments, some playing pianos, (including the maestro himself in a black hat), and then the motherlode of rhythmic memory - the vibes: xylophones and timbales. Four interlocking pianos on stage - each with its top removed to better transmit the vibration of the strings. Five xylophone-type instruments. Four human voices. Two saxophones. A violin. A cello. Because the piece is so long, (approx 45 minutes), the players occasionally replace each other for rest.

It is a spectacle unlike any other in modern art.

Time changes when you listen to Steve's music. It is, or rather was, so unorthodox, that the pulse and rate of breathing, thinking, and being, changes. It's like someone invented an alternative way of keeping time. A more human way - reflective of the ominous pain inherent in modernity and the future - whatever it may hold for us. So debased and insulted by the abomination that is the modern pop single, humans have forgotten how to actually listen to music - music that shows us something other than which clothes to buy, or how much to spend on that Sweet Sixteen Party, or which ride to pimp. Steve shows us that there is a different way. Would that we could all listen to him.

"It's all about the music," is the way one reviewer described Steve's art, that sweet sound created by a former Bay Area cab-driver who once toiled at a moving company in New York City to raise money to support his craft. In another life, Steve could have been a journalist. Or maybe he is already. Ethnomusicologist and Professor Paul Hilliard, founder of Theater of Voices and the Chief Conductor of Ars Nova Copenhagen, said that Steve "assumes the role of a reporter." And he's right. Like all journalists, Steve holds up a mirror for the world and says, "Take a good long look."

The question is, are we ready for what we see?