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.]