In his 80s, Reich Alive with Pulse

Steve Reich's 2015 composition Pulse, recorded in 2018 on Nonesuch, is new to me. It's also new, unlike anything else I've heard from Reich. The composer typically works with tiny cells of melody, but Pulse opens with a long line on the violin that zig-zags up over a drone, then subsides. After a pause, a soft but insistent pulse from piano and plucked bass begins while the opening notes now play in canon against each other creating a flurry of notes and glancing dissonances. Then another melodic pattern joins in at a much more stately pace, each note sustained as long as human breath can comfortably handle. As always with Reich, there's pleasure in perceiving different layers of music tensions between dissonance and resolution, fast and slow.

My first thought was, "Thank you, Steve Reich," for trying out your patented techniques on something different. I've been hoping years for something like this.

My second thought was that Reich has created in Pulse his most overtly spiritual work since he set Hebrew psalms in Tehillim, only this piece has a contemplative and elegiac mood, as you'd expect from a composer in his 80s. For me, the long opening line is like a prayer, yearning upwards and subsiding with a sigh. The sustained notes sound like an organ. All of it harkens back to music I've heard from Perotin, church composer of the 12th century whom Reich names as an influence.

I'm delighted to find my views congruent with others'. Reich's publisher Boosey and Hawks highlights several reviews. Reich himself calls the piece "contemplative." The New York Times reviewer William Robin writes, "The mood is one of emerging, arising." Pulse is "simple and luminous," said New York Classical Review. It's "unlike almost anything else in Reich's catalog" with "tenderly arching melodies and spacious harmonies," wrote the San Francisco Chronicle. "Not exactly easy listening but genially and spiritually alluring," wrote Mark Swed in the LA Times. "Pulse felt like a rapturous extended song" that ends "with the feel of reverie, as opposed to Reich's traditional headlong-rush climax" wrote Damien Morris in The Guardian.

My favorite review finds a story in Pulse, a kind of minimalist heldenleben. For the blog of a radio program called Second Inversion (05/28/2018), Dacia Clay first thanks Reich for this piece released on her birthday. She alludes to Aaron Copeland's Appalachian Spring and imagines

Our hero is setting out from home. The instruments—violin, viola, flute, clarinet, piano, and bass—begin to lob notes back and forth between them. But very quickly, a darker bass note joins the mix. Minors and majors mix together. The bass chugs along with nods to a steady rock music beat. There’s a stillness in the background and movement in the fore, and they swap places constantly. The instruments join together, playing in sync, and then fly apart again, creating dissonance.

Eventually the hero "comes to rest."

The "hero" narrative is a little over the top for me, but Clay zeroes in on a quality that makes even the most abstract of Reich's compositions into paeans to community. She writes, "The players involved are all wrapped up together in call and response—they need each other to create a whole melody." [See my reflection on a live performance of Drumming (07/2012).]

That Appalachian Spring comes up in at least three other reviews (Times, Guardian, and the Washington Post) reminds me that Copeland composed that piece under the title "Ballet for Martha Graham" without thought to any landscape or season. The choreographer gave the music its new title and program, forever associating its sound with fresh morning air, blue skies, and mountain greenery that Copeland never intended.

So, am I wrong to find spiritual expression in Pulse? I admire what Grayson Haver Currin writes in Pitchfork (02/03/2018) that Pulse comes from a place where "flickers of dissonance yield to waves of redemptive harmony and where the chord always comes back to sparkle," yet Currin writes this like it's a bad thing. He misses the kind of connection that Reich has made to our world in pieces about nuclear arms, terrorists' murder of Daniel Pearl, and the Holocaust. Currin, too, imagines a scenario, that an office worker goes through a tedious day. He writes that the music, operating in a "vacuum," is nice but frankly boring.

One listener's expression of spiritual yearning is another listener's vacuum. Reich's music, so focused on process from the very start of his career, invites us to make of it what we will.

I'm happy to hear Pulse my way. Let Reich be Rorschach.

[Visit my page The Minimalist Zone for a curated list of my reflections on Reich and his contemporaries Philip Glass, John Adams, and other composers influenced by them.]

Remembering Frank Boggs: Music Teacher, Spiritual Mentor, Friend

Frank Boggs has died. He taught me in high school 50 years ago, and continued to teach me even in the last 20 years of his life. Inviting me to the Metropolitan Opera's Live in HD broadcasts, he got me deeply into repertoire that I hadn't appreciated before. Each spring, he invited me up to his 22nd-floor suite to see the Tony Awards. And of course I saw his Georgia Festival Chorus every year.

With gratitude, I reprint my tribute to him, first posted in 2015.

Frank Boggs taught me in "chorale" at Westminster Schools from 1973 to 1977, but he has remained my mentor and friend to the present day. 

If my deepest ambition is to write sacred music that communicates mystery and grandeur of God, that's my response to glorious music that I learned to love through Mr. Boggs. Throughout my adult life, I've spent almost every Wednesday night in church choir rehearsals, always seeking the joy of hearing my voice blend with others, creating a piece of music that glorifies God in its expression and craftsmanship -- regardless who else may hear it. Truly, my religious faith comes from music more than from scripture or doctrine.

If I love musical theatre (not just Broadway, but opera), that comes from Mr. Boggs, too. He directed me in OKLAHOMA and LITTLE MARY SUNSHINE, and he stoked my interest in Stephen Sondheim with clipped articles and saved programs, giving me the opportunity to direct a suite of Sondheim songs for our small ensemble (see photo below), and, later, to direct the full Chorale's Broadway revue.  My first song was a lyric that he set to music for me. 

Singing is not all that happened in choir rehearsals. Mr. Boggs exposed us to music, cartoons, reviews of theatrical productions, memories of performers, and discussions of religious meanings behind music. He once asked us, "Why did Vivaldi set the happy words 'peace on earth, goodwill to men' to slow, somber minor key music?" (I'd never thought to ask why any artist does anything -- and now it's what I always do.) 

At fifteen, I liked performances that were loud, fast, flashy, with some growls and maybe some screaming thrown in. Then I saw Frank in concert. I and my fellow members of the Westminster Ensemble had performed some numbers at a church in Tennessee, and we were pretty proud of ourselves. He'd told us that he'd be "singing a few numbers," but we realized later that he had been too kind: we were only his warm up act. I remember that he sat at the piano, sang a song or two. Then, while he played some chords, he described for the audience how his grandfather used to sing a certain hymn while tending his garden. Then he lifted his hands from the keys, turned on the bench towards the audience, and sang softly, unaccompanied, a hymn of anguish:

Oh, Lord, if indeed I am thine,
If Thou art my sun and my song,
Say why do I languish and pine?
And why are my winters so long?
Drive these dark clouds from my sky,
Thy soul-soothing presence, restore --
Or take me unto Thee on high,
Where winter and clouds are no more. 

That night I saw the difference between showiness and authenticity, the same difference between entertainment and art.

Frank also gathered the young people in his care to discuss what he called "Quaker Questions," allowing us to share our memories, concerns, and questions -- bonding us and helping us to grow up. I remember asking him about the intense friendships I was enjoying at the age of sixteen: "Do adults have the same kind of friendship?" He answered honestly that the intensity probably would dissipate with time, but that friendship could deepen. Of course, now we're living that truth.

Two Mentors, 
One Photograph

[See photo]  Famed composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim sits on stage while my teacher Frank Boggs (the other bearded man) looks on. I am the worshipful seventeen-year-old second from the right. The photograph was taken in Broadway's Music Box theatre, June 1977. 

Knowing how I idolized Sondheim, Mr. Boggs had told me to write him to ask for an interview, and Sondheim instantly replied. This taught me a life lesson: If you don't at least try, you'll regret it the rest of your life. 

Twenty years later, Mr. Boggs again met Sondheim during a "meet the audience" talk at London's National Theatre. Sondheim asked, "Are you a teacher?" Mr. Boggs nodded. Sondheim said that he'd always wanted to teach, and he said how grateful he was to his teachers. Speaking of the importance of his teachers to him during a national broadcast on his 70th birthday, Sondheim actually had to stop talking, overcome with emotion.

Seated with us in the photograph are my peers in the Westminster Ensemble, who, under Mr. Boggs, sang a program of songs by Sondheim. On the way to a tour of Poland and Russia, we stopped in New York to see the Broadway revue SIDE BY SIDE BY SONDHEIM, when this picture was made. This photograph is a detail from a photo collage I made for Frank Boggs's retirement celebration. 

Other Blog Posts About Frank Boggs

• For Frank Boggs on his 94th Birthday (02/2021)
• Echoes of My Teacher's Voice(01/2019)
  
• Frank Boggs at 90 -- at 50, Frank sang "You Make Me Feel So Young" for his teenage choir; for his 90th birthday, I rewrote the lyrics for him (1/26/17)
  
• Drill it in or Tease it Out? This is a reflection on the way Frank taught us (10/1/13)
  
• Georgia Festival Chorus Celebrates "Legacy" (5/21/18) ends with links to reviews of Frank's performances that I've written over the years.

[See my Stephen Sondheim page.] 

Cycling America Virtually: San Francisco

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218 Miles from Reno to San Francisco That's 4419 miles from NYC in June 2020 to San Francisco today. [Use the arrows above to follow the entire tour from the beginning.]

Some of my earliest memories involve San Francisco. I remember riding the train there from Cincinnati where we left my newborn brother with Grandmother. I remember my berth above the compartment, and my alarm when the sun seemed to be crashing into the western horizon, its red light splattered across the lower edge of the sky. (The memory is a starting-point for a short poem about my entire life, On Track.)

We were visiting Dad's parents, my Mamaw and Pop. Dad's older brother Jack was there. At some point, Mom rode a bicycle with me in the basket on the handlebars. Later, we all went down to Los Angeles to see my Aunt Harriet.

On a later visit, Pop and Dad took my brother and me up Mt. Tamalpias just north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

The visit I remember best was in 1969, a reunion of all Mamaw and Pop's family for their 50th wedding anniversary. We visited Chinatown, saw Alcatraz across the bay and San Quentin -- during a summer when Johnny Cash's recording at San Quentin "A Boy Named Sue" was a big hit. Other hits of that summer were Stevie Wonder's "Ma Cherie Amour" and a song with significance I didn't "get" yet, "Grazing in the Grass."

[Photo: Me with my grandfather Dewey "Pop" Smoot. It's 1962, I'm three years old, and he's 63. We see the legs of Dad and Uncle Jack Smoot in the background.]

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Interface: New Word for the Ancient Miracle of Text

(I wrote this preface to a Lenten devotion booklet that my parish St. James Episcopal Church published in 2011.)

Interface is a new word for the ancient miracle of letters. You face me through this page, and I, with a pad in my den one October night, face you. I'm concerned how you'll read me; you're wondering what I'm getting at. We're face to face, mind to mind, just paper between us.

In the same way, writers of this booklet have gone one-on-one with prophets and apostles who wrote on scrolls millennia ago. One contributor emailed me that writing her meditation was a "struggle" of many days that caused her to change her mind. I'm reminded of Jacob's wrestling all night with an angel. At dawn, Jacob takes a new name, Israel. Father Dean Taylor has preached that this "wrestling" is an image for prayer, and that one one who prays is changed by the struggle.

May this interface be an instrument of transformation for those who wrestled with ancient witnesses to write it, and for all their fellow parishioners who engage them daily through these pages.

[Photo: Interface between Mom and me early in the pandemic, months before face-to-face meetings were permitted.]

Eating Holy Words

(I wrote this preface for the Lenten devotion book written by parishioners of St. James Episcopal Church, Marietta GA in 2015)

"What is your tongue?" That's not an odd question for the working mothers learning English at St. James. In Spanish, la lengua means both tongue and language. In English, tongue still commonly meant language when Thomas Cranmer admonished us to "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" Scripture in his collect for the 1549 Book of Common Prayer.

Like bread and wine, language and nourishment have always gone well together. In Psalm 19 we read, "These are the words of my mouth / these are what I chew on and pray." Hungry, Jesus would not "live on bread alone" but also on the words of the Law and the Prophets.

We hope that you will chew on the words of this book each weekday, even while you may be giving up some other food.

Besides getting your fill of Scripture, you'll get a taste of St. James from parishioners of different backgrounds and different places in their life journeys. A trio of working mothers writes in their adopted tongue. Others who write come from experiences in Adult Christian Education, Bell Choir, Choir, Congregational Care, Episcopal Church Women (ECW), Education for Ministry (EfM), Family Promise, Reach Out Mental Health, Ushers, Vestry, Wonderful Days Preschool, Book Club, and parish worship services.

The Pilgrimage at St. James has sponsored these in-house devotional booklets for many years, among other offerings of spiritual nourishment to the parish. Thanks to our stalwart contributors. I've heard that some of you enjoy tracing growth in your faith as you review your words from past issues.

Special thanks to our new contributors, and please join us again! -Scott Smoot