Revelation in Reproduction:Walter Benjamin's Prophecy and Steve Reich's Process
This article examines Steve Reich's reflections on his early works in the context of Walter Benjamin's thesis in "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility." While Reich shows a similar attitude to Benjamin's toward changes in human perception, Benjamin's notion of auratic demise is challenged by Reich's understanding of the role of technology in music and the effects of music as a gradual process, which asserts that attributes such as impersonality support artistic autonomy rather than precluding it. According to Benjamin, aura collapses due to changes in audience reception during the age of technical reproducibility, yet Reich drew inspiration from mechanical processes in order to reclaim meaningful audience participation in music. This comparative study provides the opportunity to both consider Benjamin's ideas anew and deepen our understanding of the minimalist musician's contributions to contemporary art.
People imitating machines was always considered a sickly trip; I don't feel that way at all, emotionally. I think there's a human activity, 'imitating machines,' in the sense in which (say) playing the phase pieces can be construed; but it turns out to be psychologically very useful, and even pleasurable. So the attention that kind of mechanical playing asks for is something we could do with more of, and the 'human expressive activity' which is assumed to be innately human is what we could do with less of right now.
—Steve Reich (Reich/Nyman 230)
In the 1971 interview with British composer Michael Nyman quoted above, Steve Reich stressed the musical benefits of imitating machines and the mechanical playing that emerges from it. At the time, Minimalism sought to be counter-cultural, if not counter-intuitive. Still today, however disputed the characteristics of this genre may be, Reich's early compositional process and reflections regarding the minimalist musical movement remain central to its identity.
The composer's commentary on his work is a profound source for a thorough study of technology's role in music and its aesthetic implications. The years from roughly 1965 through 1971 are pivotal in this analysis, a period in which the term Minimalism was coined and the austerity of Reich's compositions truly reflect the connotations of such a label. The framework of the following article is drawn from the writing of Walter Benjamin. Most do [End Page 193] not associate musicology with Benjamin, whose work dealt much more directly with literature, photography, and film studies. He himself stated to both Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer that the field of music was quite "remote" from his own studies (Adorno and Benjamin, Complete Correspondence 119 and Benjamin, The Correspondence 549). However, his essay "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit" ("The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility")1 and its assertions regarding technology and aura challenge and inspire theories of interpretation and reception for all contemporary art forms. Lutz Koepnick argues that Benjamin intentionally excluded music from his seminal essay (Koepnick 117–129), and my approach to considering musical production through the lens of aura does not accuse Benjamin of overlooking a particular art form. Instead, it acknowledges the scope of his ideas as extending well beyond the author's explicit discussion. The resilience of his theory of aura and auratic decline in light of technical reproduction begs for reflection relative to music, a highly iterative performance art.
Both Benjamin and Reich embrace the available technical tools and seek out positive possibilities of their application. Each acknowledges the quality and genius of past artistic efforts and artifacts, and both hold hope for future endeavors as well. Just as the aestheticization of politics under National Socialist rule drove Benjamin to write "The Work of Art," Steve Reich has commented more than once that his aversion to Serialism is rooted in its unsuitability for the American audience of the 1950s and 1960s, a place far from "the dark-brown angst of Vienna" (Schwarz 56). The following analysis uses Benjamin's diagnosis of the state of art and its potentials in the age of technical reproducibility to illuminate Reich's assertions regarding his compositions, and conversely, the composer's work and commentary refine our understanding of Benjamin's assessment. Although my research has found no evidence of a direct Benjaminian influence upon the composer's aesthetics, Reich's views about technology and compositional technique provide the opportunity to both consider Benjamin's ideas anew and deepen our understanding of the minimalist musician's contributions to contemporary art.
Of course, Benjamin himself was hardly entrenched in one ideology or another, let alone a physical proximity or temporal trend. The German Jewish intellectual's writings maddened his foes and friends alike, embodying a syncretism that intertwined disciplines and eras in ways that defied all contemporary movements, including Critical Theory (Gilloch 164). With three versions written from 1935 to 1939, "The Work of Art" represents the culmination of many years of reflection on the legacy of artistic experience, technical means, and their shared future in the West.2 On the one hand, Benjamin attempts to frame contemporary debates about art and its praxis within a history of aesthetic production and reception. On the other, he portrays a [End Page 194] radical future spurred on by the aesthetic and political consequences of technological development in artistic media.
Whether cloaked in the rites of religion or the practice of the political, Benjamin's conviction of the sociological potency of art both before and after aura is one of the few unambiguous messages in "The Work of Art." Though the precise meaning of the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of aesthetics may elude readers, Benjamin opens and closes his confounding essay with strident vigor. In assessing the present state of art, the essay first and foremost confronts fascist propaganda, but Benjamin's correspondence confirms that he was critical of prevailing communist aesthetic theories as well (Lindner 229, 232). The persistent and diverse reception history of this essay since the mid-20th century lies in its uncompromising prose about both the impact of socio-historic circumstances on art and the resilience of art itself to shape society. Throughout Benjamin's oeuvre one finds vignettes of profound creation and pervasive decline, whether the "pure language" as described in the preface of "The Task of the Translator" or the inescapable intrusion of bourgeois capitalism littering the boulevards of Paris in The Arcades Project.
Steve Reich's compositions and accompanying statements of the late sixties and early seventies similarly resisted academic modernist attitudes with a distinctive combination of innovative technique and musical tradition. Though he initially relocated to California to study with composer Luciano Berio at Mills College, working alongside Terry Riley at the unaffiliated San Francisco Tape Music Center launched his career into avant-garde music. By 1970 Reich cited ancient musical practices as central to his composing: from the medieval polyphony of the Notre Dame School in the 12th centuries (Reich, Pulse Gate 50) to interlocking rhythms, a technique Reich learned when studying drumming in Ghana (Reich, Gahu 55). He often contrasts his early compositions with three prevalent musical movements of the time: Serialism, Indeterminacy (also known as aleatoric or "chance" music), and Free Improvisation.
The Second Viennese School of Music, founded by Schoenberg and further established by his students Anton Webern and Alban Berg, greatly influenced American classical composition well into the 1960s, inspiring serialist compositions directed by fixed series of musical elements such as pitch, rhythm, and dynamics. Chance music or aleatoric music produces scores as dictated by extra-musical controls, and performances at times encompass the soundscape beyond the stage (e.g. John Cage's notorious work, 4′33″).3 Alternately, Free Improvisation emerges from spontaneous preferences and choices in concert. In contrast to practitioners of these programs, composers such as LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich sought to remedy the estranging methods of Serialism, extra-musical vagaries of [End Page 195] Indeterminacy, and the subjectivity of Free Improvisation.4 In an article for Perspectives of New Music, Jonathan Bernard highlights three distinctive characteristics of Minimalism in art and music that are ready foils to the rival movements described above: first, "the minimization of chance or accident" (95); second, "avoiding the depiction of personality that most minimal artists felt had become entirely too explicit" (96); third, a "shift in emphasis from composition to arrangement [ . . . ] or from parts to whole" (99).
Reich's early tape works, It's Gonna Rain and Come Out, defy the abstraction of Indeterminacy and the obscuring complexity of prominent Serialist standards. The former work alludes to the catastrophic dangers of nuclear war through the biblical story of Noah and the Flood, and the latter features the testimony of a black teenager beaten by police during the Harlem riots of 1964 (Taruskin 369). These avant-garde compositions both feature speech clips replicated on two loops that gradually shift out of sync as one is subtly and intermittently delayed until the loops realign. This method of constructing a composition, now known as phasing, became Reich's signature contribution to the minimalist music movement, and within a few years, he was composing pieces for conventional instruments using this technique inspired by tape.
According to Benjamin, aura collapses due to changes in audience reception during the age of technical reproducibility, yet Reich drew inspiration from mechanical processes in order to reclaim deep and meaningful audience participation in music. Close reading of Reich's most substantial statement concerning his early works, "Music as a Gradual Process," reveals that his understanding of autonomous musical process and his compositions' ritualistic function challenge Benjamin's prediction of aura's termination. Although the musician's affinity for technological experimentation in his compositions and the political implications of the pieces described above resonate with Walter Benjamin's observations concerning art in the age of technical reproducibility, the young composer's treatise points to an auratic essence in music rather than its absence, as Benjamin predicts. Reich deviates further from Benjamin's theory with a decidedly apolitical attitude toward art. Just as Reich's compositional approach shifted from spoken word to strictly instrumental works in the late 60s, his manifesto about musical process stresses a multiplicity of individual reflections instead of a common societal state.5 Nonetheless, a reemergence of aura in music is facilitated using the very technological means prescribed for the politicization of aesthetics as presented in "The Work of Art."
Any potential continuation or re-establishment of aura following the advent of technical reproduction must compensate for the shift in human perception that Benjamin documents. While Reich underestimates the impact of the mechanical inspiration of his signature phasing technique, Benjamin's insights regarding modern audience reception challenge and temper Reich's [End Page 196] simplistic views on musical tradition and human nature. Although this study challenges Benjamin by providing an example of aura's resilience, at the same time Benjamin's theories on reception and the impact of technical means in art illuminate Reich's early efforts and place in musical practice.
Auratic Decline
In order to consider Reich's characterization of his compositions as auratic in a Benjaminian sense, I briefly gloss the concept as presented in "The Work of Art." At the center of Walter Benjamin's essay is the concept of aura and its demise in the age of technical reproducibility (Benjamin, Kunstwerk 477). Aura embodies such powerful but elusive characteristics as transcendence, uniqueness, singularity, and authority. Aura is dependent on human perception, and both nature and historical influences affect audience reception of the artwork. Technological reproduction and the present-day mindset mean that one cannot engage art in the concentrated and collective manner of the past. Benjamin writes that the cult value of art is supplanted by an "exhibition value" as the technology of reproduction evolves. Rather than being created with the epitome of the original in mind, the artwork's value in its reproduction becomes the standard of quality.
In Part II of "The Work of Art," Benjamin states, "Noch bei der höchstvollendeten Reproduktion fällt eines aus: das Hier und Jetzt des Kunstwerks–sein einmaliges Dasein an dem Orte, an dem es sich befindet" (Benjamin, Kunstwerk 475). The "here and now" of a work of art are essential to its authenticity. Benjamin asserts that, as a product of technical reproduction, "[d]as reproduzierte Kunstwerk [ . . . ] in immer steigendem Maße die Reproduktion eines auf Reproduzierbarkeit angelegten Kunstwerks [wird]" (Benjamin, Kunstwerk 481). The emphasis of value no longer rests with the original. Benjamin writes that worth is now determined by how successfully the work translates into large portable quantities, and singularity is undermined. In addition to its temporal singularity, Benjamin's concept of auratic art possesses transcendent spatial characteristics as well. Using a branch and mountains as an illustration, he writes: "Diese letztere definieren wir als einmalige Erscheinung einer Ferne, so nah sie sein mag" (Benjamin, Kunstwerk 479). The exceptional nature of an auratic object is confirmed not only in its onetime appearance, but also by the insurmountable distance it poses, which prevents a detailed account of its existence as a wholly unique artifact. The degradation of the "here and now" of the artwork depends on both a change in the material nature of the artwork and a shift in audience reception.
When discussing the difference between film and theater in Part VIII, Benjamin highlights how another essential change in the process of presentation undermines aura: the camera and editing process come between the actor and his audience. The actor is presenting himself for the camera, and [End Page 197] this leads to the audience members' becoming testers of the material, because there is no human presence adapting to and engaging the audience (Benjamin, Kunstwerk 488). This shift in human perception is a consequence of both material changes in artwork reproduction and larger historical circumstances. Benjamin writes that slow-motion in film introduces finite details of familiar motions that would otherwise remain unseen by the naked eye. He likens this heightened consciousness to that of the new awareness gained through psychoanalysis (Benjamin, Kunstwerk 498). Such awareness depreciates the authority of the work of art, because art ceases to be a medium.
Jan Mieszkowski writes:
The authority of the 'here' and 'now' is realized only when 'here' and 'now' become 'then' and 'there.' [ . . . ] However we understand reproducibility to lead to the withering of aura, it is not because it introduces a difference or distance that was lacking in the original, since distance is precisely what is cultivated by the rituals of auratic art, mediacy rather than immediacy
Robert Kaufman also recognizes a lack of auratic distance as the core hindrance to the auratic experience. In his discussion of Benjamin's analysis of Shelley and Baudelaire in The Arcades Project, he writes that Baudelaire is too close to "grasp" allegory as Shelley does. Everything in contemporary society is too immediate and "so blank and busy that reflective experience seems unattainable" (Kaufman 136).
The loss of cultic value leads to gains in accessibility and authority for the public in its engagement of the work of art. With this redistribution of power between the artwork and its audience, the draw of auratic authority is usurped, thereby eliminating it as a weapon that may be wielded by tyrants. As the transcendent declines, the material reality comes to the fore. This is the trigger for the politicization of art. As immediacy forces out the possibility of symbolism and representation, it fends off misleading and abusive transplantation of allegory. Although the jaded viewer may no longer enjoy the "shimmering" aura (Kaufman 122), the public is no longer susceptible to the ensuing disorientation of the transcendent auratic experience. The symbols and associations with the former auratic do not possess the sway that they once did. The audience is, therefore, less likely to be enamored by the fleeting gratification of momentary self-expression and more inclined to perceive the material reality and to demand rights. As the public adapts to this new orientation and function of art, a new order may flourish, and all the while evading the inevitability of war as required by fascist regimes.
Steve Reich's comments to Michael Nyman above regarding "human expressive activity" reveal that he also associates a kind of bondage, albeit on an individual level, with common assumptions concerning the role of art and its relationship to humankind. In his view, listeners become entangled in [End Page 198] sonic webs of compositional complexity, or they are beholden to the capricious creativity of performers' perogatives. As a remedy, Reich draws upon inspiration rooted in technology to reclaim reflective distance and "here and now" through the impersonality and transparency of gradual musical processes, and he ascribes a continued authority and exceptionality to such works of art. Though this position challenges Benjamin's declaration of aura's demise, Reich's auratic revival confirms the German intellectual's predictions about the transformative impact of technical reproducibility on art and his diagnosis of a fundmental shift in human perception.
Mechanical Inspiration
Walter Benjamin writes that the authenticity and authority of the original are undermined by technical reproduction in two ways. First, a reproduction can manipulate the original in such a manner that its presentation of the work of art exposes details that the naked eye could not have beheld in its natural perception of the original. Second, the original may be removed from its initial circumstances and placed in situations that would have never accommodated the artwork in its original form. In Steve Reich's works (and in the case of any technical reproduction of music), the second example is obvious. Although few can fit a late Romantic orchestra in the living room, many can listen to Mahler's second symphony in the comfort of their homes with the corresponding digital music library.6 While this is a topic of interest (and even concern) for much of the "fine art" music community, the first of Benjamin's means of auratic depreciation provides more intriguing possibilities for discussion. In his writings Reich touches on a number of compositional and performance concepts that exemplify Benjamin's declarations concerning technical reproduction in the first sense stated above, including the gradual presentation of the musical subject and the resulting sensory-perceptual and intellectual experience due to the fine detail with which a musical work may be explored aurally. Before turning to these ideas, I briefly describe Reich's early experimentation with electronic media and music to reveal his understanding of the potentials and limitations of technical means in composing.
Reich's preoccupation with gradual process and the potentials of technical reproduction included film projects, conceptual works, and finally, an electronic device that determined rhythmic timing of particular sounds. In 1964, Reich's contribution to the movie Plastic Haircut implemented a collage technique, in which he sought to introduce ambiguity through overdubbing loops of excerpts from a sports-themed record (Potter 162–163). Inspired by slow motion in film, Reich conceptualized another piece in 1967 entitled Slow Motion Sound. He wanted to augment a clip of recorded speech to such a point that the glissandos and melodic aspects of spoken language were highlighted. The technology at the time could not fulfill this vision, [End Page 199] because the frequency and pitch could not be maintained as desired (Reich, Slow Motion 26–29). Reich was fascinated by and experimented with the aural possibilities of two featured techniques in Benjamin's essay: montage and slow-motion, which will be discussed further below.
Inspired by the mechanical process of constructing and manipulating tape loops for compositions, phasing is an innovative canon form7 achieved through two voices playing a short pattern or basic unit (Potter 169) (this may be a short, recorded clip or a brief melody) in unison and gradually accelerating or decelerating one voice to shift it out of sync. This process can be continued until the voices are once again in unison or in phase.8 Reich's work with phasing became not only the signature feature of his early compositions, but also an archetypal phenomenon of minimalist music. He credits technical means as the exclusive inspiration for it:
What tape did for me basically was on the one hand to realize certain musical ideas that at first just had to come out of machines, and on the other to make some instrumental music possible that I never would have gone to by looking at any western or non-western music
Initially, Reich was not even certain if a human could execute phasing and the minute gradual acceleration required. The following statement reinforces just how exceptional Reich thought the mechanical origins of his compositional concept to be:
Unfortunately, it seemed to me at the time impossible for two human beings to perform that gradual phase shifting process, since the process was discovered with, and was indigenous to machines [ . . . ] Finally, late in 1966 [ . . . ] I found to my surprise, that while I lacked the perfection of the machine, I could give a fair approximation [ . . . ]
Clearly, no one person can complete a phase with the absolute accuracy of a machine, but soon after his first three phasing tape pieces, Reich composed Piano Phase for two live performers. In this work, the human is once again the primary actor in the artistic process, but the structure of the piece finds its foundation in a mechanical process, as Reich puts it, "indigenous to machines" (Reich, Music 35–36).
Soon, however, Reich reached the limit of productive engagement with technology in composing. His early experimentations with electronic mediums culminated in the form of the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate device, a complex electronic channeling apparatus that determines the rhythm or phase shifting of corresponding sounds (Reich, Pulse Gate 38–41). Unlike many of his previous efforts, he found that, in this case, technology depreciated the musical value of the subsequent works, Pulse Music and Four Log Drums, and never used the device again. In Writings on Music, he explains: [End Page 200]
[ . . . ] the 'perfection' of rhythmic execution of the gate (or any electronic sequencer or rhythmic device) was stiff and unmusical. In any music that depends on a steady pulse, as my music does, it is actually tiny microvariations of that pulse created by human beings, playing instruments or singing, that gives life to the music. Last, the experience of performing by simply twisting dials instead of using my hands and body to actively create the music was not satisfying. All in all, I felt that the basic musical ideas underlying the gate were sound, but that they were not properly realized in an electronic device
Ultimately, he was able to realize "these basic musical ideas" more satisfactorily in Four Organs, the first in a series of compositions using no electromechanical means (Reich, Pulse Gate 45).
For almost two decades following his attempts with the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate, Reich wrote pieces solely for instruments and voices, avoiding any sort of electronic manipulation besides magnification provided by microphone. Although he acknowledges that even these works are part of a structural legacy resulting from his early experiments with taped materials, Reich does not possess a Benjaminian view of the impact of technology on the nature of art. Instead, Reich holds electronics to be no different than other resources that may be particular to a culture or community and inform the arts accordingly (Reich, An Interview 45). Revealed here are Reich's conservative ideas concerning performance and the nature of music. Unlike Benjamin, he sees the essence of music and its structure as timeless (Reich, Author's Preface viii). Even if he imaginatively re-invents these elements as inspired by machines, his return to live, strictly human performances confirms his remaining commitment to musical experience through conventional means.
Reemergence of Autonomy and Authority
In his article "Aura, Still," Robert Kaufman writes that in the Romantic Era, aura and autonomy were simultaneous and synonymous (Kaufman 122). Walter Benjamin claims that such notions are no longer possible in the age of technical reproducibility and calls for a necessary but positive departure from these aesthetic requirements through the politicization of aesthetics. However, over the course of his article, Kaufman questions the finality of the death of aura and points to instances in which he recognizes a reemergence of aura in artwork of the postmodern era (125). Similarly, other scholars have discredited aura's extinction in the decades following Benjamin's pronouncement (Gumbrecht and Marrinan xiv). It is with this possibility in mind that I would like to examine Reich's thoughts on musical process, as presented in his landmark essay, "Music as a Gradual Process." This collection of succinct [End Page 201] and bold assertions regarding the nature of Reich's compositions as process and product paint an aesthetic perspective that revives notions of autonomous and authoritative art, even as Reich's compsitions explore the artistic possibilities of techniques of reproduction.
From the very beginning of "Music as a Gradual Process," Reich asserts the exceptional and self-determinate nature of his compositions:
I do not mean the process of composition but rather pieces of music that are, literally, processes. The distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine all the note-to-note (sound-to-sound) details and the overall form simultaneously
The musical process is a system independent of the human creator, and it organizes itself according to the requirements of its own sovereign sphere. Although Reich may select the audio clip to be repeated or even compose the melody used in a phasing piece, the process itself is the work. Jonathan Bernard explains the difference between the minimalist emphasis on "arrangement" rather than "composition" eloquently when describing Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room," and these remarks apply to Reich's musical process as well: "the compositional decisions were all made before the beginning of the work—that in fact they preceded the moment at which the composition could be said, even conceptually, to have begun" (101).
Additionally, unity of form and content is a central aspect of Reich's attitude toward musical creation. He writes, "Material may suggest what sort of process it should be run through (content suggests form), and processes may suggest what sort of material should be run through them (form suggests content)" (Reich, Music 34). Such a symbiotic relationship extends as well to praxis. The autonomy of a task (both in its process as well as being) is absolute; it is not the result of an external teleological force. The consequences of total surrender to this musical process are repeatedly stated in "Music as a Gradual Process": "Once the process is set up and loaded, it runs by itself" (Reich, Music 34). And: "I accept all that results without changes" (Reich, Music 34). Finally: "sound moving out away from intentions, occurring for their own acoustic reasons" (Reich, Music 34).
The self-determinate nature of musical process requires a sort of submission, not only on the part of the creator, but also of the audience member. Reich is careful to note that entering the sphere of the musical process is voluntary, even if the results of the process must be accepted once in the music's sovereign space (Reich, An Interview 46). If aura exists in his work, new parameters cannot be imposed from without. The simultaneously forming acoustic details do not allow for meddling; the autonomy of the musical process cannot be violated in such a way. Not only would this deter the aestheticization of politics, but it also leads one to question whether a politicization of aesthetics as described by Benjamin can take place. Both of these theories [End Page 202] imply a manipulation of art, whether through adding meaning or molding aesthetics by some other means, and true autonomy does not tolerate such treatment.
A Discernible Shift in Music
The means by which the structure of Reich's works become audibly perceptible are the very same that Walter Benjamin cites as contributors to the decay of aura. According to Benjamin, gradual presentation of the artistic subject eliminates art's capacity to serve as a medium, and the multiplicity of the work of art destroys the existence of an original "here and now," thereby eradicating singularity and aura itself. However, Reich believes that the sensory perceptibility of his work and the consequent listener experience allows audience members to fulfill some of the very standards of aura that Benjamin holds to be extinct or at least inaccessible. Among the issues of contention are reproduction value, mechanical control, the effects of gradual presentation, and ritual. By weighing these themes in light of their worth and characteristics as understood by each, one can create a constellation that reveals both limitations of Benjamin's vision as well as instances in which his foresight is uncannily applicable to Reich's assessment of his own aesthetic moment in the decades following publication of "The Work of Art."
Benjamin states: "Das reproduzierte Kunstwerk wird in immer steigendem Maße die Reproduktion eines auf Reproduzierbarkeit angelegten Kunstwerks" (Benjamin, Kunstwerk 481). This aspect of Benjamin's argument has particular meaning for music as an art form. In fact, it lies at the heart of the question of auratic decay. In his essay "Benjamin on Art and Reproducibility: The Case of Music," Rajeev Patke writes:
In the visual or plastic arts, the copy cannot bespeak or embody the unique material history of the original, nor its rootedness in tradition, which contributes to its authority and aura. In the case of music, the notion of a unique history cannot really apply to the score or script as material object. Since music comes into being in time as performance, to treat authority or authenticity as attached to its physical objectification would mean little more than making a fetish of the score
(Patke 200).
As Reich clarifies the transparency of musical process, he makes a point to distinguish his style from that of contemporary movements, such as aleatoric music and Serialism. In Reich's view, both of these compositional methods are strictly intellectual. There is no perceptual structure that the listener can discern when hearing the organization of the sound, because it has, in the least, no audible accessibility due to its complexity, if not an intentional separation between compositional process and the resulting soundscape as realized by aleatoric works. Through seeking to re-establish a connection between [End Page 203] aural sense and the abstract organization of sound, Reich draws the emphasis away from the abstract notions of the composer and the material score, thereby giving more weight to the performance in its multiplicity, even as manifested in the listening experience of each respective audience member.
Perception theory is rooted in a rich Western tradition of philosophic inquiry. Aesthetic theory itself is derived from the Greek word "aistheta" meaning "perceptions," and Reich carries on the tradition of wrestling with the "relationship between the sensation and thinking, between the sensible and supersensible" (Mieszkowski 42). Although he stresses "perceptibility" in "Music as a Gradual Process," the composer sees intellect as equally necessary for beauty. He opens a short vignette for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik writing: "Schön ist ein Wort, das ich persönlich zur Beschreibung von Musik verwende, die ich nicht nur sinnlich ansprechend, sondern auch wirklich intelligent finde" (Reich, Schön/Hässlich 29).
Reich does acknowledge that indeterminacy contributes to the power of musical process through "unintended, psychoacoustic by-products of the intended process" (Reich, Music 35). However, he clarifies that even when composers such as John Cage have a definite process and accept the resulting composition, it is not audibly perceptible. "The process of using the I Ching or imperfections in a sheet of paper to determine musical parameters can't be heard when listening to music composed that way. The compositional processes and the sounding music have no audible connection" (Reich, Music 35). In Music of Changes, Cage's "process" of using the I Ching was initiated by tossing coins, which then informed pitch, rhythm, and dynamics. Likewise, even the much more meticulously structured serial compositions are not audibly comprehensible to an untrained ear, whether a result of the intentional tonal disorientation of properly executed tone-rows or the variations of series as inverse, retrograde, etc.9 Often, the complex patterns and variations may only be discovered through score analysis and with the aid of matrices. One could argue that because of this lack of audibility, such works run the risk of reification, because one must use the score in order to analyze and interpret the music.
Reich, on the other hand, did not even use scores during his early career.10 His short melodic material allows musical processes to be learned by rote (Reich, An Interview 46). This simplicity, in turn, combined with the gradual acceleration of his "infinite canon," (Reich, Music 34) enables the process and self-propelled form to be audibly recognizable. This perceptibility allows Reich's style of minimalist music to be more accessible than the other two movements.11 Furthermore, Reich's return to maintaining a tonal center in his instrumental pieces augments the appeal of his works to a broader audience than the increasing exclusivity of the more academic-oriented trends in chance and serialist music. [End Page 204]
Many proponents of Serialism and Aleatorics saw a return to tonality (even one with an ambiguous modal character, as in Reich's compositions) as a step back in the "progress" of the New Music movement in Europe following World War II (de Carvalho 127). Although Reich's essay makes apparent that he understands his compositions as self-referential, those of the New Music establishment understood his tonality and desire that music be a pleasing and exhilarating experience for the audience as compromising aesthetic quality in order to enhance exhibition value. Reich would readily concede that his understanding of the nature of music is not compatible with such "progressives." In fact, he repeatedly notes the formal heritage of his compositions through stressing the canonic and contrapuntal nature of his work.12 His approach to canon may have been innovative and inspired by electronic devices, but he acknowledges the traditions from which he draws. These include not only significant composers of Western fine art, such as Perotin, Machaut, and Bach, but also features of non-Western ritualistic traditions such as interlocking rhythm (Hillier 3). Just as Reich does not acknowledge the material medium to be as revolutionary as does Benjamin, he is more conservative than many of his contemporaries in his assessment of the extent to which music can rationally progress, instead citing the timeless value of compositional methods of the past.
Mechanical Control
Although Reich's efforts to provide interesting, accessible compositions for the listening public rankled many in the academy, still another concern was that his attitude toward music as authoritative and his compositions' acquiescence to musical processes were too constraining and inhumane. In his essay "Reception in Distraction," Howard Eiland postulates two possible outcomes in the age of technical reproducibility: human mastery of the mechanical apparatus or technology dictating humankind (Eiland, Reception 9). Reich's critics such as Dietmar Polaczek and Clytus Gottwald have argued that his early music was fascist and a fulfillment of technology encroaching upon human autonomy (ap Sion, 59–58). Just as Chaplin's character in Modern Times leaves the assembly-line, his body helplessly convulsing in the ever-repeating movements required by his labor, the mechanical inspiration for phasing encroaches upon human autonomy and dignity.
According to these critiques, the imitation of machines points towards human subordination to the technical apparatus. However, as noted above, both Reich and Benjamin hold positive expectations for the possibilities that technology creates for art. Additionally, Reich's experience with the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate reveals that he indeed makes a distinction between mechanical inspiration and intrusion. In that case, he admits that the technical [End Page 205] means were overpowering and that this—at the very least—depreciated, if not eliminated, the inherently experiential value of music. He expresses the need for human imperfection and "microvariations" in order for music to possess "life" (Reich, Pulse Gate 45). He also states in "Music as a Gradual Process" that the essence of musical process lies with the reception of the audience, giving further evidence of his inclination toward art as a dynamic practice.
Many readers of "Music as a Gradual Process" are so caught up in Reich's demands for a self-determined process that they fail to see the ways in which he allows for contingency and the human factor. As much as he may stress the authority of musical process, the root of his works' power lies in the listeners' various experiences. Reich often understands his compositional process to inform not only the work itself but the consequent audience reception as well. This is reflected in an interview for Artforum given in 1972. He said:
I want something to be totally observable, absolutely out in the open—except that even though it's within the grasp of everyone listening, and is totally perceivable, it's still impossible to hear all at once . . . because although the actual number of patterns being played in my music is limited, when they mix simultaneously in your ear there are an infinite number of them you can select to concentrate on
Much of the intensity and strictness found in Reich's essay is due to the prevailing opinions and artistic movements of the time. He is seeking to re-establish the notion of art as autonomous and promote what he understands to be the positive outcomes of engaging in a creative activity where personality or immediate impulse is not at the center. He describes the attitudes in the 1960s about composer input, as follows:
There's a certain idea that's been in the air [ . . . ] and I think it's a very injurious idea [ . . . ] It is that the only pleasure anybody who is a performer (be it dancer or musician) could get was to improvise, or in some way to express his or her momentary state of mind. If anybody gave them instructions or material to work with, this was immediately equated with political control or with negative action
Reich describes the restrictive nature of his processes as more closely related to the discipline of eastern meditative practices13:
By voluntarily giving up the freedom to do whatever momentarily comes to mind, we are as a result, free of all that momentarily comes to mind. The extreme limits used here then have nothing to do with totalitarian political controls imposed from without, but are closely related to yogic controls of the breath and the mind
Not only do these statements reject the idea that fascism is at the root of Reich's music, but they also call for the listener to play an active role in the [End Page 206] artistic process. As he refers to the "yogic controls of the breath and the mind," one can once more see Reich's commitment to the aesthetic tradition of sensory-perceptual and intellectual unity noted above. In addition to constructing pieces in which the note-to-note superstructure is accessible, the minimalist approach opens up a new mental landscape for the listener's exploration as she allows the auditory input of a given composition to suppress typically emerging thoughts. Sensation and thinking are then symbiotic, mutually reliant upon and benefiting one another. Though one may question the rigor, consistency, and even sincerity of Reich's statements about the effects of his works upon audiences, for my purposes, his conception of musical praxis provides a productive contrast to Benjamin's aesthetic theoretical thesis.
When Benjamin identified the fascist aestheticization of politics, he pinpointed the primary persuasive power of their propaganda to be that of aura. The masses were not only placated by the promise of self-expression but also willing to live under dictatorship. Reich, on the other hand, recognizes in aura the opposite. Rather than luring the public into a trap, Reich's musical process liberates through creating a space and experience free of personality and whatever societal preoccupations or pressures one may undergo. The authoritative system of musical process is so different from that of the daily life that one does not inform the other. Although the listener experience is not a mindless escape, it is an opportunity to shed the shackles of the modern world and pursue an exceptional state of mind via the sensory realm of music.
The preceding discussions of perceptibility and mechanical process address two primary and conflicting criticisms of Reich's work. The first claims that he compromises artistic quality through returning to tonality and considering the desires of the audience, while the other condemns his compositions as too mechanical and lacking the human element. This very contradiction affirms that Reich's efforts to provide the listener with an exceptional experience through voluntary submission to the authority of the musical process have achieved a balance that honors the autonomy of both listener and art.
Technical Tools as Auratic Means
In his essay, Benjamin not only identifies an historic transformation of human reception and the loss of traditional reflective experience, but also demands that the consequences of this new reality be examined and its implications for artistic production and response be explored. Through this effort, he develops his notion of the distracted critic and, using film as his medial model, outlines the new potentials for art and its role in society. Although the audience member is stripped of the traditional means of concentration and the necessary auratic distance, this does not mean that the work of art itself cannot be engaged in a productive manner. Eiland highlights two attitudes toward [End Page 207] distraction found in Benjamin's writings on Brecht and in "The Work of Art" that are then further discussed in The Arcades Project (Eiland, Reception 3). Over the course of his discussion, Eiland distinguishes between mere distraction and productive distraction (Eiland, Reception 9).
In terms of art using a technological medium, Eiland argues that Benjamin sees mere distraction as an occurrence in which, "the experience is one of being mastered by the apparatus [ . . . ] instead of mastering it for the good of humanity" (Eiland, Reception 9). Positive distraction, on the other hand, is "distraction as a spur to new ways of perceiving" (Eiland, Reception 9). The consequences of technologization are not all negative. The pace of present-day life conditions one to have a "high-speed vigilance" of sorts. (Eiland, Reception 6). One can see this need for vigilance described in a note for Part XIV, in which Benjamin describes Chockwirkungen: "Das Bedürfnis, sich Chockwirkungen auszusetzen, ist eine Anpassung der Menschen an die sie bedrohenden Gefahren. Der Film entspricht tiefgreifenden Veränderungen des Apperzeptionsapparates" (Benjamin, Kunstwerk 503). This vigilance may be necessitated and developed by adverse circumstances, but it also opens new possibilities for art and reception. Such is the state of mind of the distracted critic that Benjamin describes in Part XV of "The Work of Art" (Benjamin, Kunstwerk 505). Although the concentration required for auratic artwork can no longer be maintained, a new reception among the masses may be cultivated.
Eiland sees interruption as a central concept in Benjamin's theory of distraction, and it is demonstrative of just how this new receptive model functions. The "principle of interruption" is a common element in both Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt and the method of montage, the two primary approaches Benjamin acknowledges for engaging those in a state of distraction (Eiland, Reception 4). When executed, Reich's phasing technique also embodies this principle. Once a shift of the overlapping musical motive has achieved the next rational subdivision and created another submelody, it is soon interrupted by the resumed acceleration of the moving basic unit. The tempo manipulation in a phasing piece causes the basic unit to continually interrupt itself as the self-reflective process unfolds.
Ironically, the perceived seamless nature of phasing (Schwarz 61) and film editing is even more important to Reich and Benjamin than their means of interruption. In her contribution to A New History of German Literature, Lindsay Waters captures the essence of this paradox well, writing:
To Benjamin's mind, film was a particularly compelling medium since it seems to present reality without human intervention. Film makes the art form transparent, or, as Benjamin formulates it, "the equipment-free aspect of reality has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become the 'blue flower' in the land of technology" (SW 4:263) [ . . . ] Film is perceived as seamless, but in fact it is nothing but seams, having been assembled from vast [End Page 208] numbers of shots that have been edited and re-edited, cut and chopped and then sutured together
(Waters 792).
Although Reich does not cut and suture material in this same manner,14 he does achieve a seamlessness through perpetual repetition. Each phasing piece is a microcosm of reproducibility—a temporal illusion, where even a phase achieved through the deceleration of gradually slowing the tape leaves the impression of forward motion. Reich emphasizes the lack of technical manipulation (i.e. no material is cut into his selected tape clips) or compositional intervention during his musical processes. However, the duplication, layering, and gradual staggering of a given clip out of and back into unison gives a false aural impression of acceleration, rather than a recognizable sense of the actual minute, intermittent retardandi. Furthermore, Reich's musical processes may preserve the integrity of selected clip in a limited sense, but this excerpt is deeply changed by tying together the seams created by extraction to create a loop and multiplying it in both its horizontal repetition and the vertical layering and subtle, slowing manipulation of copies atop itself.
Perhaps the most apparent conflict in Reich's means of composition with Benjamin's thesis is found in the alleged receptive impact of extremely gradual presentations of the artistic subject. This technique is one that Benjamin relates to the heightened consciousness, symptomatic of a culture influenced by psychoanalysis, and, as Kaufman (136) and Mieszkowski (40) observe, this increased awareness eradicates the experience of art as a medium, thereby eliminating aura itself. But, Reich's writings about gradual process as accomplished through phasing and other augmentation techniques concentrate on very different results in audience reception. A gradual musical process makes possible the continued interest in and discovery of details, according to Reich. "Listening to an extremely gradual musical process opens my ears to it, but it always extends farther than I can hear" (Reich, Music 35). This notion of very close and intimate examination of a work that is beyond reach or comprehension is quite similar to the illustration of aura provided by Benjamin in which the auratic essence of art remains distant no matter how closely it is examined. (Benjamin Kunstwerk 479).
At first glance, this level of accessibility would appear to indicate a lack of auratic distance, a precursor of critical reflection (Benjamin Kunstwerk 479). Reich, however, does not concur with Benjamin in this instance. He maintains that this heightened awareness does not preclude the "mysteries" of a given musical process (Reich, Music 35). Although the process is quite regular and has an "intended" format, Reich claims to achieve a "liberating" and ritual-like experience for the listener, which shifts "attention away from he and she and you and me outward toward it" (Reich, Music 36). Sub-melodies and harmonics will be discovered or perceived differently by various audience members and when listened to multiple times (Reich, Music 35). Reich claims that the processes he pursues allow a shift of attention from [End Page 209] personal preoccupations to a strict concentration on the impersonal process at hand (Reich, Steve Reich 230).
Thus, closes the essay, "Music as a Gradual Process," and with these assertions, Reich's conception of artwork and audience realigns with Benjamin's assessment of aesthetic reception in the age of technical reproducibility. Reich is reacting to the very effects of psychoanalysis that Walter Benjamin uses in his essay as an illustration of historical influences on human perception. Music as a gradual process redirects the typical procedure of introspection. Rather than engaging in the common practice of pop-psychology and connecting every interaction and observation to the subconscious, Reich invites the listener to leave personal preoccupations behind and enter the sphere of music as process. There one finds freedom and can participate in the ritual of experiencing the unfolding task at hand. Paradoxically, he claims that concentrating on acoustics "occurring for their own reasons" is a psychologically helpful experience (Reich, Music 35). I submit that Reich is responding to the very state of human apperception which Benjamin describes. At first glance, one might conclude that this impersonality would exclude aura, just as the "tester's" state of mind in Part VIII of "The Work of Art" cannot perceive aura. However, according to Reich this very condition of impersonality provides an escape from a persistent preoccupation with one's own psyche in daily life, and distance from this mentality reintroduces ritual.
In explaining the transcendent nature of musical process, Reich says that "the actual number of patterns being played in my music is limited, when they mix simultaneously in your ear there are an infinite number of them you can select to concentrate on" (Reich, An Interview 45). This statement echoes Benjamin's prediction regarding art produced for its reproduction value. Multiplying a single expression (verbal or musical) in Reich's musical process achieves a receptive richness and variety precisely by way of technical reproduction as its layers of repetition shift away and toward one another. Though the visual representation and the execution of the composition is uncomplicated, the subjective listening by any given individual during any given hearing can produce a different sensory perceptual experience each time. Nevertheless, in Reich's description of musical process, authenticity and originality are preserved, as these characteristics are produced by the audience members themselves. This means that audience appeal then plays a central role in the presence of aura. So, rather than supplanting cult value as Benjamin describes in Part V of "The Work of Art," exhibition value becomes an auratic prerequisite, in that it entices the listener to enter the realm of ritual.
Conclusion
Reich does not see the impact of technical reproduction as significantly different from that of other material innovations that have shaped and influenced [End Page 210] musical creativity in the past. However, he does acknowledge that phasing technique and other gradual processes he worked out in his compositions "just had to come out of machines." (Reich, Steve Reich 229). In this sense, Reich fulfills the hybrid of man and machine that Benjamin proposes (Waters 794) and underestimates the substantiality of musical process as "indigenous to machines" (Reich, Steve Reich 229). Auratic geniality now rests not solely in the human mind, but is a result of human interpretation of and innovation with technological processes. Reich revives ideals of autonomy and ritual to reintroduce aura, but this reemergence is based on mechanical processes and the musical structures that materialize from them. Only then is the artistic product suitable for the modern listener and the changes in human reception as observed by Benjamin.
In an analysis of Serialism, chance music, and Minimalism, Elaine Broad discusses the non-narrative structure of the minimalist and experimentalist musical movements (Broad 52). The majority of Western music history revolves around teleological narratives driven by harmonic progressions. In fact, non-narrative music is not to be heard since Perotin and the Notre Dame School of the 12th century, one of the traditions which Steve Reich cites as informing his compositional ideas.15 Along with Cage and Boulez, Reich also has drawn inspiration from Webern's notion of "beauty in the erection of pure structures" (Broad 55).
Structure as the source of musical beauty, rather than stories as implied by the narrative or goal-oriented models of most Western traditions, brings to mind Benjamin's discussion of architecture—a form of art that allows habituated reception. One of the most challenging aspects of Minimalism is that it is a more atmospheric form than those to which audiences and critics were (and remain) accustomed. In a review which described Reich's work as "Fließbandmusik," Clytus Gottwald cited one listener's response to a televised program of Reich's music in the early seventies. The caller wittily asked: "Merkt Ihr denn nicht, daß Eure Platte einen Sprung hat?" (Gottwald 6). This comment reinforces just how contrary to former expectations nonnarrative form is. To appreciate this listening experience, one must develop, as Michael Nyman noted, "a fundamentally new way of listening" (Reich, Steve Reich 230). Minimalism's repetition and steady pulse do not contain "points of culmination" or conflict (Broad 58). These differing sensoryperceptual and intellectual practices of receiving music are reminiscent of Benjamin's distinction between optical and tactile perception insofar as the traditional rules of and expectations for musical symbolism no longer determine a proper receptive posture. Through its non-narrative form, Minimalism provides a new mode of reception for the contemporary listener. Rather than continuing to necessitate the traditional state of concentration as with goal-oriented music, this structurally-based style surrounds the listener with sonic stimuli free of any lines or harmonic developments that must be "followed." [End Page 211]
The material uniformity of both Minimalism and mass reproduction reintroduces contingency through providing flexibility in audience reception. In the case of Minimalism, the lack of voicing and rhythmic accents enables the listener experience to be self-guided. The absence of a clear harmonic progression and the corresponding goal-orientation also ensures more freedom for the public and is adapted to the contemporary state of distraction. The ever-present repetitive nature of Reich's pieces allows a familiarity that might be compared with the habitual reception that Benjamin describes. The prevailing narrative-based Western music of previous centuries can be viewed as an exercise that requires concentration of the optical senses, whereas the minimalist non-narrative structure provides a space for tactile engagement.
Broad's observations concerning Steve Reich's vision of his compositions affirm its exceptional nature, not only relative to teleological forms, but also in comparison to his contemporaries within Minimalism:
Reich does not intend to lull the listener into a trance as Riley and especially Young tend to do. He wants the listener to be aware of detail—an awareness without involving anticipation or recollection. But if the music is objective and thus no psychological tension is created that needs resolution, it exists without the "subjectivity of the listener"—why listen at all?
In one sense the listener is only a witness to the process in a passive way; yet, because the music is without directionality, this allows him/her room for personal experiential interpretation. Anti-teleological art does not permit itself to be objectified—we need to participate in it
(Broad 59).
This paradox of passivity and participation embodies the spirit of Benjamin's distracted critic. Awareness of detail and elimination of subjectivity echoes the objectivity in film that Benjamin identifies, and finally, the possibility of "personal experiential interpretation" through a lack of "directionality" enables a ritualistic experience, as Reich describes.
The word Zerstreuung can mean either distraction or dispersion, and Sammlung means both concentration and collection. Let us consider how Benjamin's notions of reception in Part XV of his essay are changed when the respective latter definitions are applied. Earlier, people would collectively gather in one place to reflect on a given work of art. Over the course of their concentration, they would then enter into the given object. In the present state of dispersion, such communal reception of art rarely occurs. For instance, music listening takes place more often individually, as people enjoy a personal music library compiled on their computers or in devices such as their phone. With this understanding of Zerstreuung and Sammlung, a new value of art is revealed. Benjamin maintains that, even with the concentration required to enter into a work of art, person and art may still abide in one another, but now, the artwork enters into the individual. This means that one may carry it wherever one goes. Now, the original time and place of the piece is no longer the mitigating factor, but rather portability determines worth. [End Page 212]
Liberation is achieved through the distance from self-reflection and personal interest that the autonomous sphere of musical process provides and through the ritualistic experience one may have within. Reich is revitalizing two of the major components of aura that Benjamin declares extinct, through inspiration from the very medium that was initially charged with aura's demise. Reich has never couched his thoughts with reference to "The Work of Art." However, he does address significant factors in Benjamin's discussion. Toward the close of his essay about art and Benjamin, Mieszkowski discusses reflection and contingency (Mieszkowski 48–52). In a very literal manner, music as a gradual process reflects on itself. As it transforms from a brief melody or clearly spoken line to a complex contrapuntal piece, the initial effect is echo-like, and its utmost complexity is merely the result of the initial phrase repeated and shifted within its own system. Reich's input as composer was simply to choose the materials with which to run the process. Even the rate of acceleration was ceded after he began using live musicians as the medium, rather than tape. As previously stated, the contingency of these processes lies primarily with the listener. Their experience is in large part dependent on the process, but never at the whims of composer or performer. In this sense, such a stringent format for composition resists tyranny as may be exercised by either the artwork's creators or presenters. The sphere of the artistic experience is determined by the artistic process itself, but the way in which an audience member engages the subject is unique to that individual, an act fundamentally resistant to despotism. This reinstatement of autonomous aesthetic ideals and ritual allows aura to reemerge, as the audience enjoys a world free from the pressures of modernity that insist on immediacy.
In "The Machine Takes Command," Lindsay Waters writes that Benjamin's contemporaries were aghast at excluding authenticity as a criterion for artwork, but Benjamin knew that the inevitable developments of mass culture should not be shied away from, but rather engaged and thoughtfully considered (Waters 793). Benjamin rightly recognized the break-down of the original's authority and authenticity, as found in its "here and now." But, Steve Reich's innovations in using a technological medium as a means of musical process reveal that, despite a change in audience reception and the new possibilities of technical reproduction, aura can exist. It is found in the aesthetic autonomy of the self-determinate work of art, whose identity, as a network of relations, is perceived uniquely at every occasion it is withheld. The age of technical reproducibility does signal a substantial shift away from the former experience of art, but this reality does not demand an irreversible end to aura. It is true that aura is no longer experienced through a unique object. However, its authority and singularity are discovered conversely through each individual's unique reception of the artwork in its multiplicity. [End Page 213]
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Footnotes
1. I will refer to this work as "The Work of Art" in the remainder of the article.
2. In the 2014 biography, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings point to 1922 as the year in which Benjamin's fascination with recent developments in technical artistic mediums and the history of art is peaked (172).
3. Reich's thoughts on his compositional process as distinct from methods such as those employed by John Cage will be discussed further below.
4. There is debate about whether these styles of composition truly dominated the academy to the extent that Minimalists describe (see the Musical Quarterly article, "The Myth of Serial 'Tyranny' in the 1950s and 1960s," by Joseph N. Straus). Surely, the minimalist composers were outsiders. (Reich's first concerts outside of the tape music scene were all in art galleries, rather than concert halls.) That said, total serialists, such as Milton Babbit, were in a different minority of their own.
5. Robert Schwartz notes that Reich claimed in 1969 that he never intends to make a political statement with his music and then in 1994, he goes even further, asserting that art can have no effect on political realities (104). Nevertheless, Richard Taruskin frames Reich's work as highly political in The Oxford History of Western Music (370–372), and the politics of music criticism certainly inform Reich's representation of his work, even if he would maintain that the pieces themselves are politically ineffective in a more general sense.
6. Adorno addresses this very issue in his essay, "The Radio Symphony." However, Adorno's adoration of serialism coupled with his contempt for jazz and Stravinsky are so contrary to Reich's compositional inspirations and values that this discussion does not incorporate his commentary.
7. Canons are musical forms that are imitative, in which a melody is repeated by two or more voices that are temporally staggered. Many are familiar with this technique from singing "Row, row, row your boat" in canon form. Another well-known instrumental example is "Canon and Gigue 3 for Three Violins and Basso Continuo" by Johann Pachelbel (commonly referred to as "Pachelbel's Canon").
8. The following link contains an audio file of Peter Aidu's (solo!) rendition of Reich's first phasing piece for live performers, Piano Phase: www.archive.org/details/top.09 (accessed September 26, 2017).
9. This brings to mind Milton Babbitt's 1958 article for High Fidelity, "Who Cares if You Listen?" (originally "The Composer as Specialist") in which he forthrightly delineates the general inaccessibility of serious compositions, suggesting that both the composer and his music would benefit from a complete withdrawal from public life. Then, "the composer would be free to pursue a private life of professional achievement, as opposed to a public life of unprofessional compromise and exhibitionism" (53).
10. Scores do exist for archival purposes, but as described above, Reich eschewed written materials when collaborating with other musicians for rehearsals and performances.
11. In the intervening years this assertion has been tested. Indeed, music theorist Paul Epstein discovered a "secret" retrograde structure in phasing processes, but as Taruskin points out, Reich himself may not have been aware of this. The occurrence could be considered one of the many treasures that buoy auratic essence in the face of reproducibility (Taruskin 374).
12. This came up time and again in interviews I reviewed during research. For recent examples of Reich's emphasis on "restoration" rather than "revolution" see David Shariatmadari's 2016 interview for The Guardian, "Steve Reich: the composer with his finger on the pulse" and Reich's appearance in April 2016 on the Canadian Broadcast Channel program, "q," with host Shadrach Kabango.
13. I highlight this comparison with practices of yoga to emphasize the somatic nature of Reich's perspective in contrast to the separation of bodily and intellectual experience that have dominated discussions of New Music, which focus on matrices and numerical probabilities in aesthetic production. It is by no means intended to reduce the many and varied traditions of yoga practice to one generic art. Reich himself practiced yoga regularly for many years.
14. Reich's only technical manipulation is selecting the material to be looped, layered, repeated, and "phased." The basic unit remains untouched.
15. It is true that instrumental music's non-representational character has been not only acknowledged but promoted among music aesthetes since ETA Hoffmann's review of Beethoven's 5th Symphony. Even so, there are harmonic and tonal underpinnings which commonly anchor analyses such as Hoffmann's and later Hanslick's. 20th century composers' commitment to atonalty displays the centrality of harmonic structure in its insistence that tonality's dismantling is the necessary next step in music's evolution—the absence of a "home" note.
