Rethinking Reich ed. by Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn (review)

There's a prescient scene at the beginning of Björn Runge's 2017 film The Wife. A biographer named Nathaniel Bone is seeking skeletons in the closet. He has wheedled his way onto the same flight that the protagonist (the novelist Joseph Castleman) has taken to Stockholm, with his wife, tobe awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Bone approaches the couple and we see their obvious disdain––they're already aware of him by name and politely accept his congratulations for what he describes as an 'astounding achievement' (he doesn't think spouses get enough credit, but I won't spoil the plot any further).The disgruntled Castleman reminds him in no uncertain terms that 'I am not giving you permission to write my biography', before asking him to leave them alone.

It's hard not to see this brief encounter as an archetype of the scholar's relation to a still-living creative subject. Bone could pass as any mid-ranking faculty member, dry and obdurate, in need of meat for his next project. Castleman, then, is the model artist, the great man––his focus above all on his own work rather than on what Steve Reich once called 'meaningless intellectual jargon' (p. 10). The great man has little time for the inquisitive academic who is little more than an irritation, someone who wastes time on futile erudition to cover up'simple facts'. Bone, however, is far more perceptive than either Castleman or his wife admits. They know their history will be written in his words; their legacy is resting in his hands.

When I began thinking seriously about Reicha decade ago, this was very much the case. My requests for an interview were politely declined: Reich was, on first enquiry, unable to schedule one; on second enquiry he was flatly 'unavailable'. Looking at an early period he had neglected to document fully in his personal archive, my solution was to look to the people surrounding him at the time––figures such as Jon Gibson, Pauline Oliveros, Tom Constanten, Ramon Sender, and R. G. Davis associated with a nascent West Coast counterculture. Our conversations were the highlight of my research: unlike the composer himself, they were willing to open up in wonderfully generous, lucid, and idiosyncratic ways. I remain indebted to these denizens of the sixties––figures who, as Oliveros's and the Fluxus artist Benjamin Patterson's passing in 2016 sadly showed us, will not be around forever.

Rethinking Reich thus comes at acrucial moment when these rhizomatic histories are at risk of disappearing entirely or else being lost to the mute voices of the archive. Written material nevertheless looms large in this book, the Paul Sacher Stiftung having acquired its Steve Reich Collection in 2008, along with subsequent additions by the composer. Reich's files (handwritten, hybrid, and digital) now sit alongside sources relating to Bartók and Stravinsky, as well as to his former teachers Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio. The Sacher holdings are thus a kind of canon––for Reich, a self-conscious canonization at the heart of Europe among a modernist elite. This newly archived material largely justifies the publication of Rethinking Reich and indeed the notion that Reich should be 'rethought', wrested away from a former generation of well-thumbed monographs, such as Edward Strickland's Minimalism: Origins (Bloomington, Ind.,1993), K. Robert Schwartz's Minimalists (London, 1996), and Keith Potter's Four Musical Minimalists (Cambridge, 2000).

For these scholars, a number of Reich's works were yet to be published or had only recently been made available as printed scores. If we look closely, large gaps exist between the stated date of composition and the score's year of copyright: Piano Phase (1967), for instance, was copyrighted in 1980. The convoluted history of this piece is traced assiduously in a chapter by David Chapman, revealing a genealogy at odds with Reich's ambiguous yet...