Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

This is a dark and stormy night. Riving winds push debris through the broad streets of Denver. Safeway bags hover and swoop above the parking lot. Full moon hides in the clouds. A few people, just a few, huddle in dim light outside the lobby of the Paramount Theater. Sidney Goldfarb and I are headed for a concert by my old friend, Steve Reich. We’ve been friends from the time we were at Cornell together. I sometimes crashed in his loft on South Broadway, and then on Duane Street when I needed to be in the city. These were heady times, these were desperate times. Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, was the catch and the misery. The Sixties were a’coming in. Phil Lesh visited him while I was there. They had studied together at Mills College, under Luciano Berio. I remember Lesh saying, “Something is happening, man. Something is out there, out of our control.” The US was out of control. Gulf of Tonkin deception. The lust for war was the catch. It was many years before it dawned on me that Lesh was one corner of The Grateful Dead, and the stoned music cult was starting to swell. Steve debuted “Come Out,” his powerful tape phase-shift work. It was technically innovative, politically derived. This was at the Park Place gallery on LaGuardia Place, where Charles Ross, a sculptor and mutual friend, was showing one of his early prism pieces. I went to rehearsals at Reich’s loft once or twice a week, and learned a lot about the rigor with which he pursued his narrow aesthetic. What dedication the musicians had to his vision. He was rehearsing his Music For Eighteen Musicians . The piece is largely derived from a seminal work done by Terry Riley a few years earlier, called In C . Compared to the Riley piece, I found Reich’s take a little heavy handed. At rehearsal the musicians repeated and repeated for hours the minutely incremental phrases, until they got the sound he was after. It was painfully tedious to witness, but sometimes the reward was a glorious intoxication.

“Minimalist” was not a label I would have put on the music he and Phil Glass were performing at the time. Webern’s Bagatelles were minimal. When Steve or Phil performed in lofts or galleries they cranked it, maximally. It wasn’t listening music. The sound was an inundation. It poured down the walls. My experience was like I was lying between the rails as a train passed over. There was a little room to rock, but I didn’t dare roll — no place to hide on the undercarriage of serial music.

Sometimes we did a light Passover Seder at his loft, or at my home in Pine Bush. He visited me once in my tipi in Cape Breton, during a dreary stretch of rain and fog. He hated it, maybe because Phil Glass had found Cape Breton first. I was a great fan at his concerts, and touted his music to everyone. I went to his spectacular wedding in the clouds at the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center. The clouds cleared. All of New York City, all the Palisades, all the vast New Jersey, spread out beneath his betrothal. I was a great admirer of Beryl, his new wife. The Orthodox Judaism made me nervous.

Since I moved west we haven’t seen each other much. I look forward to this concert. I think he’ll enjoy meeting Sidney, a maverick playwright and poet, colleague of mine, who has had works produced by The Talking Band at La Mama, and who adapted the Thomas Mann story, “The Transposed Heads,” for the Julie Taymor production at Lincoln Center. Steve was the first to alert me to Julie Taymor’s talent. I feel bad for him that the turnout is poor, the theater only one third full. During the week I’ve called local public radio to argue that they need to present more than the short snips of his music to have it make sense. The concert is a pleasure of Reichmusic. They do a truncated version of Separate Trains , and Clapping Music , and a new piece. After the final applause Sidney and I amble down to the stage to greet the maestro. I make a lame casual joke like, “You guys are still wearing the same white shirts.” Steve was famous for insisting all his musicians wear white shirts, even at rehearsals. “White shirts,” he repeats, as if I have insulted him. He turns his back on me and walks away. This is the last time we ever speak.

I try to figure that out. How did I transgress? It couldn’t have been my white shirt mumble. Other old friends of his say he cut them off the same way. Reich snubbees make an interesting group. Charles Ross allowed Reich to use his loft to premiere a new piece for the critics and aficionados, at no expense to Reich. My son, Avrum, who worked for Ross, operated the elevator, an old-fashioned freight loader you had to stop with a hand on the cable. Avrum often says he enjoyed the evening, especially running the elevator for the faint of heart from the Upper East Side, but got not a word of acknowledgement or thanks from the maestro. Ross now is on Reich’s snub list. At Yale, my son Rafael, who was doing graduate work in Chinese language and culture, ran into Reich on the campus, and said hello, reminding the maestro that he was my son. He had always liked Rafael, and when we were speaking would ask about him, but Reich snubbed this son as well.

I get it but I really don’t get it. We never had a conversation about what the problem was. Maybe the snubbing happened because I remained friendly with his rival, Phil Glass? In the beginning they were jockeying for players and performance space. Reich always stated his opinions with a self-righteous, moral fervor. It was part of his charm. He often “disapproved” of Phil’s music. He condemned John Cage’s work. You risked being excommunicated if you told him that you had moods only Brahms could satisfy. Among writers he was faithful to William Carlos Williams, to Ezra Pound. He ran his scooter on Wittgenstein gas. He touted Jackson MacLow to me, as if threatening divorce if I didn’t like his work. I’ve admired Jackson MacLow’s work, but not as a cause to follow. Reich was competitive. When he gave me a copy of the first book about his music he said, “I’m tired of your showing me a new book every year. Here’s one from me.” If this was a competition, he definitely is the winner. Maybe my work couldn’t rest in the Procrustean bed of his opinion. Maybe the problem was that I didn’t follow him into Orthodox Judaism. Beryl’s family was orthodox, and Reich embraced this. Part of our friendship had been a sharing of spiritual interests. When I was twelve I checked in on my own, against the wishes of my family, to an orthodox synagogue in Washington Heights. I enjoyed studying Hebrew, learning the rituals. I even wore the tsitsis, the exposed fringes of which made me vulnerable to Irish gangs out of The Incarnation School. That adventure was enough religious wisdom for me. There was no way I was going to follow Reich to his rabbi.

Now I have lost the ability to hear Reich’s music. I can’t enjoy it. Many of my friends who don’t know him swoon over his work. I love much of the music of some of his near contemporaries in the new classical modes — Terry Riley, Gavin Bryars, LaMonte Young, Annie Gosfield, John Adams, George Crumb, Alvin Curran, Arvo Part, Philip Glass. I noted with interest in the recent publicity around his seventieth birthday how little his perspective has changed. His relationship to the music before him still eliminates everything after Bach. He still runs on Williams and Wittgenstein, as well as on his orthodox convictions — firm if restricting fuel sources. For me, however, with no way of knowing why he stopped what once had been a rich conversation, I can see him only as nasty, opinionated, narrow-minded, boring.

“Ecco, Rencine.” The bus driver pushes open the door. I step down onto the dirt road, pack over one shoulder. A light drizzle is like a cold kiss on my face. Below the road and into the hazy distance the gentle hills of the “crete” hump softly to the horizon, hills covered with vineyards, olives, wheat, beans, punctuated by lines of cypress. The bus winds away towards Asciano. I took this bus from Siena. I got to Siena from Firenze by train. At the crest of the hill above the road is the farmhouse where George and Katy Schneeman live, with sons Paolo and Elio. This is Rencine. It looms above me in the grey sky like a peasant castle.