Reich hopes music keeps reporter Pearl's name alive

09/29/2006 4:31 AM, Reuters


Composer Steve Reich does not expect his memorial piece for Daniel Pearl to stop what he calls the "medieval religious war" that claimed the reporter's life.

He just wants to keep Pearl's name alive.

Approaching his 70th birthday on Tuesday, Reich, known as a founder of minimalism in classical music, shows no signs of slowing down or tempering his views.

"If anybody had told me 20 years ago you're going to be approaching 70 and worrying about a medieval religious war that could destroy New York City, I'd have said, 'Hey get a good shrink or have a few drinks and forget all this stuff'.

"But sad to say, it's come to be reality," he told Reuters.

Reich thinks Islamic militants are even now trying to get an atomic bomb into his native city. He also blames them for the murder of an innocent man, the 38-year-old Pearl.

The Wall Street Journal reporter was abducted in Pakistan in 2002 as he chased leads after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the U.S.. Claiming the American was an Israeli spy, his captors made a videotape as they slit his throat and beheaded him.

"Daniel Variations," scored for four singers accompanied by a small ensemble and using words Pearl spoke on the videotape, has its world premiere at London's Barbican Hall on October 8.

It caps a birthday retrospective of Reich's pulsating, often hypnotic music in which instruments seem to blend into one another in "Drumming," "Desert Music" and "Music for 18 Musicians."

Reich was deeply affected by the September 11 attacks. His son and granddaughter were in his apartment near the World Trade Center when the two towers collapsed.

A commission to write a memorial piece for a fellow Jewish American, he said, was something "to get the juices flowing, this really was something that mattered to me."

But after four decades of writing music that at times had a hard time getting heard, occasionally soared in the classical charts ("Music for 18 Musicians" has sold 250,000 copies), and once was turned into a hit song, he harbours no illusions.

"Picasso - one of his greatest works was 'Guernica' and it was done as a protest against civilian bombing. As a painting it's a masterpiece and will live as long as paintings live but as far as stopping bombings it was an utter, complete failure.

"I don't expect a great deal better from myself than I do from Picasso."

TRANSFORMED MUSIC

Over the past four decades Reich's work, successful or not, has transformed the music scene, both classical and pop.

In "It's Gonna Rain" in 1965, he sampled the words of a street preacher. Eventually Brian Eno and David Bowie sought him out and deejays built on Reich's techniques.

"It's really kind of nice to see people who weren't even born when this music was written or created finding an interest in it 30, 40 years later and wanting to appropriate it or steal it for their own music."

Reich thinks classical music made a wrong turn when serialist Arnold Schoenberg went down the path of atonality in the 1920s, leaving behind the folk tradition.

"He decides popular music is trash and his school turns a deaf ear to the street and they suffered the consequences.

"No one wanted to hear that stuff. So what I basically feel is that what I and other people of my generation have done is return to normalcy. It's not a revolution."