In October several of New York’s most prestigious venues joined forces in a rare cross-institutional Festival honoring the career of Steve Reich, born October 3, 1936. Some 12 weeks later celebratory presentations around the globe marked the same landmark for Philip Glass, born January 31, 1937.
There is a complex and intriguing bond which unites these two colossal talents and their work, with many common threads that tend to connect their worlds, but with just as many points of separation that continue to haunt their uneasy relationship.
Their backgrounds are uncommonly similar. Both are from urban Jewish families, Reich’s marked by the divorce of his parents, which he referenced in his masterpiece, Different Trains. Both pursued broadly liberal arts studies at prestigious universities, Glass excelling in the University of Chicago’s programs in philosophy and mathematics and Reich studying philosophy at Cornell. Juilliard’s graduate program shepherded both into careers as composers, under the defining hand of famed educator Vincent Persichetti, who encouraged a freer originality among his students, unlike the doctrinaire academic rigors elsewhere that are thought to have diminished audiences for practitioners of the much-maligned “twentieth-century music.”
The extraordinary creative landscape of downtown Manhattan at the powerful historic moment of the late 1960s fuelled their separate entrees into the arts, providing one of those singular creative cauldrons that brings to birth brave new worlds of artistic quest and innovation. With paradigm shear comparable to that era’s social upheavals in gender, race, and politics, the young generation of artists of this era experienced a creative climate similar to that in the early twentieth century, in the Vienna of Schönberg, Klimt, and Schnitzler and the Paris of Cocteau, Léger, and Milhaud — where music, art, poetry, and performance remixed the old formulas for how an artistic work was made, how artist and audience communicated, and how domains of thinking and creativity found fresh form.
This was the era of Judson Church, where choreographers such as Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer were reinventing the world of dance. It was a time of rich collaborations across boundaries in music, dance, and the visual arts. Perhaps none was more important than the epochal Einstein on the Beach of 1976, a stage work of great originality, staged by Robert Wilson, with music by Philip Glass. This triumph cast Glass as a remarkable creative partner, generous and incisive in collaborative spirit — a professional quality that would continue to guide his artistic curiosities. Later endeavors would bring him into creative alliances with such diverse figures as Allen Ginsburg, Sol LeWitt, David Byrne, and Errol Morris.
Such was the world when both Reich and Glass created new music, even as they formed their own bands to make sure the music would be heard. For a brief while they performed in each other’s bands, as fellow travelers embarking on a common journey, even as a common set of landmarks would continue to define their careers long after they parted collegial company. Their paths of attainment would both include premieres at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s edgy Next Wave Festivals, important recordings by the Kronos Quartet, and pioneering operas and stage works that exploded boundaries of existing norms. Major choreographers would champion their work and, in turn, see their dances pulse with extraordinary beauty through the two composers’ genius. Think only of Twyla Tharp’s masterful In the Upper Rooms, with breathtaking music by Glass, and the more intimate Fase by Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, who would later create landmark dances to Reich’s Drumming and Music for 18 Musicians. As individuals and as pillars within the cohort of new composers drawn to this exciting style of music, they taught young audiences how to reconnect with the exhilaration of concerted music.
Forays into world music brought fresh influences to bear on both of their creative worlds. Reich’s life-changing experience in Ghana in 1970 has long been cited, as the intricate, beguiling rhythmic patterns of Ghanaian drumming cast its spell over the composer of such modern masterpieces as Drumming and Music for 18 Musicians. Global influences on Glass’s music are no less telling, but rather more diffuse, with his Ravi Shankar collaboration, the imagined landscapes of Akhnatan’s Egypt and Ghandi’s India, and the inspired and exhilarating musical textures that Glass gave to Godfrey Reggio’s films, Koyaanasqatsi (1982) and, with special explorations of global rhythms, Powaqqatsi (1987).
The careers of each are marked, separately, by important spiritual dimensions. Glass’s adherence to his adopted Buddhist faith has brought nuance and meditative dimension to such projects as his Ghandi opera Satyagraha and the Martin Scorsese film Kundun. It has also engendered a life-long advocacy for the Tibetan people, with annual benefit concerts at New York’s Carnegie Hall that routinely attract an all-star list of performers and contributors to Tibet House. While not professing deep adherence to his Jewish faith, Reich has created several poignant compositions rooted in Jewish history and culture. His ecstatic Tehellim (1982) reawakens in modernist voice the joyful outpouring of Hebrew Psalms of praise. His ambitious work for theater, The Cave, confronts the modern worlds of Jews and Muslims through the imagined setting of the Hebron Mosque of the Patriarch, where Abraham’s offspring Isaac and Ishmael took divergent paths toward countervailing faiths. And in Different Trains he marshaled voices of Holocaust survivors in invoking the German trains that carried Jews to the death camps.
Gemini-like forces in modern music, Glass and Reich have coursed through our cultural worlds as parallel universes of remarkable originality. Each birthday celebrant was accorded due honors, with an array of observances throughout the world last January, honoring Glass’s long popularity, and an extraordinary alignment of tributes last October, with three of New York’s major cultural institutions joining in the month-long “Steve Reich @70” festivals at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The October events resembled the kind of major retrospective that important museums mount to bring great public recognition to a seminal artistic career, by gathering in its central galleries a representative progression of how the artist’s work evolved over time and how critical response continues to take the measure of the honoree in the enduring value of his work.
