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‘English is the Only

Language Which I
Speak’: New Narratives
in Reich’s My Name Is
(1967)
Contemporary Music Review, 2019

John Pymm

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Contemporary Music Review

ISSN: 0749-4467 (Print) 1477-2256 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gcmr20

‘English is the Only Language Which I Speak’: New

Narratives in Reich’s My Name Is (1967)

John Pymm

To cite this article: John Pymm (2019): ‘English is the Only Language Which I Speak’: New
Narratives in Reich’s My Name Is (1967), Contemporary Music Review
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2019.1596634

Published online: 29 Apr 2019.

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Contemporary Music Review, 2019

https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2019.1596634

‘
English is the Only Language Which I
’ ’
Speak : New Narratives in Reich s My

Name Is (1967)
John Pymm

Reich’s My Name Is (1967) has become more widely known through its recent commercial
recording by Powerplant (2012), but scholarly discussion of the piece has been until now
almost entirely absent, despite the piece having been through a number of versions. The
archival materials housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung offer new insight into the work’s
compositional journey, from a piece generated by the voices of its audience to an
ensemble work consisting of the voices of the performers themselves. What emerges is a
tangled narrative of Reich’s views of language, speech, and identity, which materialise
through the evolution of My Name Is. One moment stands out in particular in this
narrative, a little-known German version of the piece, Mein Name Ist … (Portrait der

Schola
Reich Cantorum,
’s own 1981),
ensemble, My which
NameisIs:a Ensemble
parallel work to an The
Portrait. English version
Bayer produced
Records for
recording
of the German piece released in 1993 was subsequently deleted, and Reich’s later
comment, ‘Forget this piece, I have’, appears to forbid further scholarly investigation.
This paper offers a close reading of the versions of My Name Is, opening up new
perspectives on the composer’s approach to using speech material, and in so doing
reassessing the piece’s significance.

Keywords: Steve Reich; My Name Is; Phasing; Tape Manipulation; Analogue; Language;
Narrative; Protagonist; Multi-media

Steve Reich’s My Name Is (1967) has existed in relative anonymity during the half-
century since its composition. Following hard on the heels of his two seminal tape
pieces, It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966), My Name Is bears the same
family trait of phasing short snippets of recorded speech material to create larger
musical structures. Despite several re-workings, however, the piece has enjoyed little
of the scholarly attention lavished on its predecessors. The reasons for this are
unclear, but may include: the composer’s ambivalent attitude towards the work,
especially his dissatisfaction with not being able to regulate the phasing process as

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

2 J. Pymm
he wished; the event-specific nature of the piece, which made the creation of a com-
mercial recording problematic; or even the impracticalities in the 1960s of having to
carry around the necessary amount of equipment. My purpose is to shed new light
on this little-known work, tracing its development from a participatory tape piece
for audience, though film and ensemble readings, to its reinvention for the digital
era. This is not merely a story of technological advancement—the evolving search
for an appropriate musical vehicle that could bear this curious form of audience
engagement—but a narrative that opens up new, unanticipated perspectives on
Steve Reich’s approach to the selection and use of speech-based material.
The principles underlying My Name Is are disarmingly simple and have framed each
version of the work, regardless of radical advances in the technology available to realise
them. Reich’s original hand-written score from May 1967 (see Figure 1) provides clear
instructions as to how to perform the piece using analogue technology with speech
material being recorded on magnetic tape, looped, and then manipulated to create
the phasing process as each loop is played against itself. The source material is to be
created by members of the audience each saying ‘ My name is … ’ into a tape recorder
as they enter the performance venue. During the first half, these recordings are
assembled into three or more tape loops, the order of voices determined, and the
phase piece is ready for delivery by the start of the second half of the concert.
Jumping ahead over forty years, the eventual release of a commercial recording of
My Name Is breathed new life into what had by then become a virtually unknown
work by a now very well-known composer. Joby Burgess’ ensemble, Powerplant,
hooked Reich’s interest and gained his permission to include the piece as part of a
tour schedule with the ensemble’s first performance of My Name Is taking place on
10 March 2011 at Dartington Hall, UK.1 This digital reincarnation of the 1960s ana-
logue piece carries Reich’s authority, with Burgess commenting that ‘Steve seems
pleased with the version we’ve done—we did it live for him in Glasgow and he
liked that this thing he’d abandoned had a new life’ (Chadburn 2013). The recording
:
 liked that this thing he’d abandoned had a new life’ (Chadburn 2013). The recording
uses the source materials from the Dartington concert and appears as Track 9 on the
album 24 Lies Per Second,2 demonstrating how the principles of My Name Is can be
realised with digital technology, producing a superior sound quality and making
unnecessary the frantic splicing of tape loops during the first half of the performance.
The broad compositional principles remain true to Reich’s score but in place of
magnetic tape, the Powerplant version uses a self-built Max Patch over a multi-
channel speaker system. Rather than collecting the recordings at the door, Burgess
—and sound designer Matt Fairclough—wander around the audience, asking eight
or nine people for their names, capturing and editing on the fly and beginning the
piece as soon as good enough samples have been captured. The process is less variable
than was the case with tape loops, and Powerplant’s intention is that the work should
generally last less than 10 min and consist of five voices with three loops each. The Dar-
tington recording lasts for 10’ 08 ” and makes use of the voices of five members of the
audience: Becky, Andy, Elise, Jacqueline, and Ulysses. Burgess notes that for the
recording, a considerable amount of additional time was spent working with the

Contemporary Music Review 3

Figure 1 Reich’s handwritten score of My Name Is, May, 1967. Steve Reich Collection, Paul
Sacher Stiftung. Used by permission.

voices, and that Reich himself was involved in commenting on the mixes.3 The result
of this work is the only commercially produced and composer-sanctioned recording of

MyThe
Name Is. material for the Powerplant recording is notable for the voices all having
source
pervasive—and rather obvious—British accents. While there are obvious practical
benefits that come from the use of digital technology, the change of accents carries
greater significance since—beyond the immediate novelty value for an audience

4 J. Pymm
hearing the voices of some of its members—My Name Is creates potential layers of
meaning through the language and accent of the speakers, and the location of the per-
formance. These linguistic features might well have escaped notice but for Reich
drawing attention to them in a previous version of the piece, and insisting that his
1981 German version entitled Mein Name Ist should be disregarded for not being in
American English.4 On this criterion, the Powerplant version of My Name Is also
stands out as being conspicuously non-American, and invites a close reading of the
piece’s source materials to grapple with this linguistic conundrum and interrogate
the issues of identity that it raises.

Origins of My Name Is
On 10 April 1967, Steve Reich—a thirty-year-old composer with an emerging pench-
ant for creating music for non-traditional spaces—wrote to Phyllis Yampolsky, a
socially-, philosophically- and politically-engaged artist who had suggested he
produce a piece of phase music for performance al fresco in Central Park.5 Yampolsky
had been active at the Judson Memorial Church in Washington Square South in Man-
hattan where, between 1961 and 1963, she had founded the Hall of Issues, an art exhi-
bition that also functioned as a gathering space for activists. Reich had recorded
Yampolsky’s voice for Buy Art, Buy Art, another tape-phase piece that would be pre-
miered in May 1967 at the Museum of Merchandise in Philadelphia and so she would
have been recently acquainted with the composer’s style. She was also, conveniently at
that stage, artist-in-residence in the New York Park Department where her work in
promoting participatory arts events in the city’s parks built on the recently-established
‘Hoving’s Happenings’, so-named after Thomas Hoving (1931–2009) whose one-year
:
 incumbency as Commissioner of Parks in 1965 had promoted Central Park as a place
for ‘free, enlightening events open to every denizen of New York City’.6
Reich proposed a working title of Any Loops Phase—My Name Is, possibly with the
intention of it being performed at such an ‘ enlightening’ event although the proposed
performance space in Central Park is neither identified nor described. Happenings had
previously taken place in various parts of the park, and it is unclear whether an audi-
ence was to be specifically invited or would have merely comprised the collection of
people who happened to be present in a given area at the time of performance. The
piece is conceived as a participatory, site-specific offering where the voices of several

audience members supply the required source material. This act of musical democracy
seeks to ensure that—by contrast with It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out—there is no
single voice speaking for the many: the many would now speak for themselves.
Reich’s proposal relies on the technology of its time, phased tape loops, which by
1967 had become his established compositional stock-in-trade. He is precise about
the required technology: good-quality, battery-operated portable tape recorders, spe-
cifying that they should be Nagra or Uher. These are to be carried through the per-
formance area, with selected audience members invited to be recorded speaking
their name in the format, ‘My name is … ’. Several of these recordings would then
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