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Rethinking Reich
Rethinking Reich
EDITED BY
Sumanth Gopinath
Pwyll ap Siôn

1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gopinath, Sumanth S. | Pwyll ap Siôn.
Title: Rethinking Reich / edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018041188 | ISBN 9780190605285 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780190605292 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Reich, Steve, 1936—Criticism and interpretation. |
Minimal music—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC ML410.R27 R47 2019 | DDC 780.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018041188

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
To Beth and Nia, and dedicated to John Thomas Becker (1986–2017) and
Dafydd Tomos Dafis (1958–2017)—two close friends who were also very talented
musicians. They will be missed.
Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Copyright Permissions xi
List of Contributors xv

Introduction: Reich in Context 1

Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn

I Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

1 “Departing to Other Spheres”: Psychedelic Science Fiction,

Perspectival Embodiment, and the Hermeneutics of
Steve Reich’s Four Organs 19
Sumanth Gopinath
2 “Moving Forward, Looking Back”: Resulting Patterns, Extended
Melodies, Eight Lines, and the influence of the West on Steve Reich 53
Pwyll ap Siôn
3 Different Tracks: Narrative Sequence, Harmonic (Dis)continuity,
and Structural Organization in Steve Reich’s Different Trains
and The Cave 75
Maarten Beirens
4 “We Are Not Trying to Make a Political Piece”: The Reconciliatory
Aesthetic of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s The Cave 93
Ryan Ebright

II Repetition, Speech, and Identity

5 Repetition, Speech, and Authority in Steve Reich’s “Jewish” Music 113

Robert Fink
6 Steve Reich’s Dramatic Sound Collage for the Harlem Six: Toward a
Prehistory of Come Out 139
John Pymm

vii
viii Contents

7. From World War II to the “War on Terror”: An Examination of Steve

Reich’s “Docu-Music” Approach in WTC 9/11 159
Celia Casey

III Reich Revisited: Sketch Studies

8 “Save as . . . »”: Hybrid Resources in the Steve Reich Collection 179

Matthias Kassel
9 Sketching a New Tonality: A Preliminary Assessment of Steve
Reich’s Sketches for Music for 18 Musicians in Telling the Story
of This Work’s Approach to Tonality 191
Keith Potter
10 Improvisation, Two Variations on a Watermelon, and a New
Timeline for Piano Phase 217
David Chapman
11 Steve Reich’s Counterpoints and Computers: Rethinking the 1980s 239
Twila Bakker

IV Beyond the West: Africa and Asia

12 Afro-Electric Counterpoint 259

Martin Scherzinger
13 That’s All It Does: Steve Reich and Balinese Gamelan 303
Michael Tenzer
14 “Machine Fantasies into Human Events”: Reich and
Technology in the 1970s 323
Kerry O’Brien

Works Cited 345

Index 369
Acknowledgments

The two editors of this volume would like to thank the following:

The Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, and all the scholars and staff there, especially
Matthias Kassel (curator of the Steve Reich collection), Tina Kilvio Tüscher, and
Isolde Degen; Oxford University Press, especially Suzanne Ryan, who provided
much-needed guidance, advice, and encouragement from our initial, tenta-
tive proposals to the final publication; also Vika Kouznetsov, Lauralee Yeary,
Jamie Kim, Adam Cohen, Dan Gibney, Eden Piacitelli and all those at Oxford
University Press who have assisted with copyediting and indexing; Christina
Nisha Paul (Project Manager for Newgen Knowledge Works), Sangeetha
Vishwanthan, Susan Ecklund, and Pilar Wyman; Janis Susskind, Mike Williams
and Tyler Rubin at Boosey & Hawkes; Katie Havelock and Matthew Rankin
at Nonesuch Records; Livia Necasova at Universal Edition; Philip Rupprecht,
Laura Tunbridge, and Marianne Wheeldon, as editors of previous volumes in
the Rethinking series for readily sharing valuable advice; Lynda Corey Claassen
(Director of Special Collections & Archives at UC San Diego Library), Shelley
Freeman; Josh Rutter for his willingness to participate in this project and his
contributions to it.
The editors also wish to thank all the contributors to this volume for their
willingness to respond to requests for changes, corrections and additions; and
for their patience throughout the publication process.

Sumanth Gopinath wishes to thank friends and family, especially his partner
Beth, his parents, Sudhir and Madhura, and his brother, Shamin, for their un-
wavering support and love; Pat McCreless, Michael Veal, Michael Denning,
Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, Robert Morgan, Jim Hepokoski, John MacKay, Greg
Dubinsky, Michael Friedmann, Matthew Suttor, and other faculty members
who were important influences on his work on Reich while in graduate
school; Beth Hartman, Robert Adlington, Jonathan Bernard, Trevor Bača, Seth
Brodsky, Thomas Campbell, Michael Cherlin, Eva R. Cohen, James Dillon,
Eric Drott, Gabrielle Gopinath, Ted Gordon, Russell Hartenberger, Michael
Klein, Matthew McDonald, Leta Miller, Ian Quinn, Rob Slifkin, Jason Stanyek,
Vic Szabo, his co-editor and all of the contributors to this volume, all grad-
uate students participating in his “Musical Minimalisms” seminar between
2005 and 2018, his colleagues in the music theory division (Matt Bribitzer-Stull,
David Damschroder, and Bruce Quaglia) and School of Music at the University
of Minnesota, and many other interlocutors on Reich and minimalism over

ix
x Acknowledgments

the years, for their innumerable insights; the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, for
a fellowship to study there for a month in August 2015; and the University of
Minnesota, for a research grant from the Imagine Fund.

Pwyll ap Siôn wishes to thank friends and family, especially his partner Nia; his
parents Morwen and John; Tomos and Osian, staff and colleagues at the School
of Music, Bangor University; doctoral students who helped in various ways with
this publication, especially Twila Bakker and Tristian Evans; Bangor University
for granting a period of research leave during 2015–16; the British Academy for
the award of a Small Research Grant in 2014–15 to visit the Paul Sacher Stiftung,
Basel; the Leverhulme Trust for the award of a Research Fellowship in 2016–
17 to carry out further research on the music of Steve Reich, especially Anna
Grundy; Nikki Morgan and Martin Rigby for providing English translations to
German texts; Rafael Prado and the Fundación BBVA in Madrid; and belated
thanks to Bryony Dawkes for the Grainger excerpts.
Copyright Permissions

The following figures, tables and examples have been reproduced with kind
permission from the Steve Reich Collection, Paul Sacher Foundation (PSS), Basel
Figure 1.1 An approximate transcription of Reich’s sketchbook doodle,
August 14, 1969, Sketchbook [1].
Table 3.1 List of harmonies attributed to each scene of act 2 of The Cave,
transcribed from the composer’s Sketchbook [42].
Example 3.1 Speech melodies in The Cave from the first Hagar scene, act 1 (1993
version).
Example 3.2 Sample and harmonies from The Cave, act 1 (“Isaac” scene) as
notated in Reich’s sketchbook, Sketchbook [41].
Example 4.1 Transcription of entry dated July 22, 1990, in Sketchbook [41].
Table 4.2 Fragment from “Abraham & Nimrod” computer document.
Table 6.1 Arrangement of tape transcription, sourced from SR CD-3 Track 5
entitled Harlem’s Six Condemned.
Table 7.1 Steve Reich’s list of interview questions for WTC 9/11 (2010).
Example 7.1 Compositional sketch dated “7/28/10”.
Figure 8.1 Steve Reich, Different Trains (1988), screenshot of the folder structure
in list form.
Figure 8.2 Steve Reich, Different Trains (1988), screenshot of the folder structure
in expanded list form.
Example 9.1 February 1, 1989: untitled sketch for Music for 18 Musicians,
recopying of “cycle of 11 chords,” dated “2/1/89,” Sketchbook [39], whole page.
Example 9.2 February 20, 1975: “Work in Progress for . . . 18 Musicians,”
ten pulsing chords, treble only, dated “2/20/75,” Sketchbook [15], first two
staves only.
Example 9.3 March 14, 1975: “Opening Pulse—revision & expansion,” dated
“March 14,” Sketchbook [15].
Example 9.4 April 28, 1974: untitled sketch for pulse and oscillating chords,
dated “4/28” Sketchbook [13] whole page.

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xii Copyright Permissions

Example 9.5 December 4, 1974: untitled sketch for a sequence of four-part

chords, on page dated both “12/2” and “12/4” Sketchbook [14] whole page.
Example 10.2 Transcribed selection from Reich’s first Variation on a Watermelon
(digitized archival recording of March 19, 1967 performance at Park Place
Gallery).
Table 10.3 Fairleigh-Dickinson University Program, January 5, 1967, in folder
“Programme Jan 1967”.
Chapter 10, Appendix 1 Transcription of the March 1967 Performance of the
second Variation on a Watermelon (digitized archival recording of March 19,
1967 performance at Park Place Gallery).
Chapter 10, Appendix 2 The Piano Phase improvisation, January 1967 (digitized
archival recording of January 5, 1967, performance at Fairleigh-Dickinson
University Art Gallery).
Table 11.2 Comparison of select early Electric Counterpoint computer files.
Figure 12.1 Reich’s sketch for Clapping Music and Music for Pieces of Wood.
Example 12.12 Transcription of Reich’s final sketch for Electric Counterpoint.
Table 13.1 List of recordings of Balinese gamelan in Reich’s collection.
Example 14.1 Reich’s Four Log Drums, mm. 4–5.
Example 14.2 Music for 18 Musicians manuscript [2/10], p. 1, mm. 1–8.
Example 14.3 Music for 18 Musicians manuscript [2/10], p. 84, mm. 577–82.
All text references, transcriptions of (or from) interviews taken from sources kept
at the Steve Reich Collection, including the composer’s own comments and/or
annotations, have been used with permission from the Paul Sacher Foundation.

Copyright permissions from other sources:

Front Cover: Steve Reich during a rehearsal of Music for 18 Musicians, New York,
March 1976. Photograph by Betty Freeman © Copyright Shelley Freeman (with
thanks to Lynda Corey Claassen, Director of Special Collections & Archives,
Mandeville Special Collections, UC San Diego Library, and Matthias Kassel at
the Paul Sacher Stiftung).
Example 1.4 Reduction of Four Organs, m. 11. © Copyright 1980 by Universal
Edition (London) Ltd., London/UE16183. Reproduced by permission.
Example 2.2 Flute melody and piano 1 part in Eight Lines, rehearsal 74A ©
Copyright 1980 Hendon Music, Inc., a Boosey & Hawkes company. Reproduced
by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.
Copyright Permissions xiii

Example 2.4 Extended melody in flute in opening section of Eight Lines,

rehearsal 11. © Copyright 1980 Hendon Music, Inc., a Boosey & Hawkes
company. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music
Publishers Ltd.
Example 5.1 Reich, The Cave, act 1, scene 1, mm. 10–30. The Cave by Steve
Reich and Beryl Korot © Copyright 1993 by Hendon Music, Inc., a Boosey
& Hawkes company. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music
Publishers Ltd.
Example 5.2 Reich, The Cave, act 1, scene 7, mm. 1–16. The Cave by Steve Reich
and Beryl Korot © Copyright 1993 by Hendon Music, Inc., a Boosey & Hawkes
company. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.
Figure 10.1 Reich demonstrating the “stacked-hand” disposition in Piano
Phase (source: Steve Reich: Phase to Face, dir. Éric Darmon and Frank Mallet).
Illustration by Stephanie Fitzgerald. Used with permission.
Figure 14.1 Four Log Drums at the Whitney Museum of American Art
(May 27, 1969). Photograph © Richard Landry
Figure 14.2 An image from the documentary Wasserpfeifen in New York:
Musikalische Avantgarde zwischen Ideologie und Elektronik [45:46] (reproduced
in New Music: Sounds and Voices from the Avant-Garde [44:32]). © Michael
Blackwood Productions Inc.

The format for indicating minutes and seconds in this volume is as follows: 04:33
Contributors

Pwyll ap Siôn is Professor of Music at Bangor University, Wales. His publications

include The Music of Michael Nyman (2007) and Michael Nyman: Collected
Writings. He coedited The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and
Postminimalist Music (2013) with Keith Potter and Kyle Gann, and has
contributed articles and reviews to Contemporary Music Review, Twentieth-
Century Music, and Performance Practice Review. In 2016, he received a
Leverhulme Research Fellowship to focus on the music of Steve Reich. He also
contributes regularly to Gramophone music magazine.
Twila Bakker completed her doctorate in musicology at Bangor University,
Wales, in 2016, focusing on Steve Reich’s Counterpoint pieces. Her current re-
search, supported by a 2018 Paul Sacher Foundation research grant, addresses
digital sketch studies utilizing Reich’s compositional output as a case study.
Bakker is a committee member of the Society for Minimalist Music and holds
previous degrees in music and history from the University of Victoria and the
University of Alberta, Canada.
Maarten Beirens studied musicology at the Catholic University of Leuven
(KU Leuven), Belgium, where he was awarded a PhD in 2005 for his thesis on
European minimal music. He then held a postdoctoral fellowship awarded by
FWO Flanders at KU Leuven, conducting research on the music of Steve Reich,
before being appointed lecturer in musicology at the University of Amsterdam.
He contributed a chapter to The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and
Postminimalist Music (2013). Other publications have appeared in the Revue
Belge de Musicologie, Tempo, and Contemporary Music Review.
Celia Casey submitted her doctorate in musicology at the University of
Queensland, Australia, in 2018, researching the creative process in Steve Reich’s
speech works. Prior to this, her first-class honors thesis investigated aspects
of Erik Satie’s contribution to conceptual art. Her research has benefited from
interviews with Reich and from the support of a Paul Sacher Foundation re-
search grant and travel awards from the University of Queensland, allowing sev-
eral visits to the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, to undertake sketch studies. She
has performed widely as a cellist and vocalist and is currently employed by the
Queensland Symphony Orchestra.
David Chapman is Assistant Professor of Music at Rose-Hulman Institute of
Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he teaches music history and theory
to engineers, mathematicians, and scientists. His research focuses primarily

xv
xvi Contributors

on the role of performance, improvisation, and ensembles in the downtown

New York avant-garde music scene of the 1960s and 1970s. He holds degrees
in piano performance and in musicology from Kennesaw State University,
Georgia, and the University of Georgia, respectively. He received his PhD from
Washington University in St. Louis in 2013 for a thesis on Philip Glass and the
downtown New York scene between 1966 and 1976.
Ryan Ebright serves as an Instructor of Musicology at Bowling Green State
University. He earned his PhD in musicology at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill in 2014 and holds a masters’ degree in musicology and vocal
performance from the Peabody Conservatory. His research includes music for
the voice, stage, and screen, with an emphasis on contemporary opera, min-
imalism, and nineteenth-century lieder, and has been published in American
Music, Notes, and the online publication on contemporary music NewMusicBox.
Robert Fink is Professor of Musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of
Music and author of Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural
Practice (2005). His publications on minimalism and repetition, popular music,
the fate of the classical canon, and problems of musical analysis have appeared
in Rethinking Music (1999), Beyond Structural Listening? (2004), and The
Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (2013),
and in journals including Cambridge Opera Journal, Journal of the American
Musicological Society, and American Music. Along with Cecilia Sun, he is the
collator of Oxford Bibliographies Online’s substantial entry on “Minimalism.”
Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of
Minnesota. He is the author of The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural
Form (2013) and coeditor, with Jason Stanyek, of The Oxford Handbook of Mobile
Music Studies (2014). His research ranges widely from Steve Reich and musical
minimalism to Marxism and music scholarship, sound and digital media, Bob
Dylan, Benjamin Britten, the aesthetics of smoothness, and the music of con-
temporary Scottish composer James Dillon.
Matthias Kassel studied musicology and German language and literature in
Freiburg im Breisgau. He has been a curator at the Paul Sacher Foundation,
Basel, since 1995. His publications and articles focus mainly on composers’
collections in the archive. Recent interests include the work of Mauricio Kagel,
and the Steve Reich collection, as well as the performance practice and archival
aspects of new music.
Kerry O’Brien is an Instructor at the Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle. She
received her PhD from Indiana University in 2018, having written a disserta-
tion on the history of the arts organization Experiments in Art and Technology
(E.A.T.), 1966–1971, which includes a chapter on Steve Reich. Her work on
postwar experimentalism, minimalism, and countercultural spirituality has
Contributors xvii

been supported by a Presser Music Award, a Paul Sacher Foundation research

grant, a Getty research library grant, and an American Fellowship from the
American Association of University Women. Her research has been published
in the Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung and NewMusicBox, and in articles in
the New York Times and the New Yorker online.
Keith Potter is Professor of Music at Goldsmiths, University of London. Active
as both musicologist and music journalist, he was for many years chief editor of
Contact: A Journal of Contemporary Music, the thirty-four issues of which will be
republished online in 2019. For a decade, he was a regular music critic for The
Independent daily newspaper. A founding committee member of the Society for
Minimalist Music, he was its Chair from 2011 to 2013. His publications include
Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass
(2000) and The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist
Music (2013), coedited with Kyle Gann and Pwyll ap Siôn. Recent publications on
Reich, arising from research carried out at the Steve Reich archive at the Paul Sacher
Foundation, Basel, have appeared in Tonality since 1950 (2017) and Contemporary
Music Review (2018); and the outcome of collaborative projects on musical per-
ception and cognition, involving music by Glass as well as Reich, appeared in
Music and/as Process (2016) and the journal Time and Time Perception.
John Pymm is Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Wolverhampton.
He is a founding member of the Society for Minimalist Music and was elected
three times as the Society’s President between 2013 and 2017. He has given nu-
merous international conference papers on the music of Steve Reich, based on
archival research carried out at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, contributing
a chapter to The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist
Music (2013). He received his PhD from the University of Southampton in 2013.
Martin Scherzinger is Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication
at New York University. His research focuses on the relationship between sound,
music, media, and politics, and his work has appeared in publications including
Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought (2002), Beyond Structural Listening?
(2004), and The World of South African Music: A Reader (2005) and in the
journals Current Musicology, Perspectives of New Music, and Cultural Critique.
Michael Tenzer is a performer, composer, scholar, and teacher. He has been
active in the international proliferation of gamelan music since 1977, under-
taking years of fieldwork in Indonesia and cofounding Gamelan Sekar Jaya in
Berkeley in 1979. He was the first non-Balinese composer to create new works
for Balinese ensembles in Bali. His book Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Art of
Twentieth Century Balinese Music (2000) received the Alan P. Merriam Prize of
the Society for Ethnomusicology and the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. He has
a PhD in music composition from UC Berkeley and has been Professor of Music
at the University of British Columbia since 1996.
Rethinking Reich
Introduction
Reich in Context

Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn

Now we were home again, sitting among the colors of the living room.
I started to put Van Morrison on, and she said, “Hey, have you ever heard
Steve Reich?”
I told her no. I told her I’d been living outside the music zone, catching
whatever happened to blow through. She said, “I’m going to put him on
right now.” And she did.
Steve Reich’s music proved to be a pulse, with tiny variations. It was
the kind of electronic music that doesn’t come from instruments—that
seems made up of freeze-dried interludes of vibrating air. Steve Reich was
like someone serenely stuttering, never getting the first word out and not
caring if he did. You had to work to get the point of him, but then you got
it and saw the simple beauty of what he was doing—the lovely unhurried
sameness of it. It reminded me of my adult days in Cleveland, those little
variations laid over an ancient luxury of replication.1

The narrator in this passage from Michael Cunningham’s novel A Home at

the End of the World (1990) is Bobby Morrow, a young baker from Cleveland.
Bobby has recently moved in with Jonathan Glover, his gay childhood friend,
and Jonathan’s female roommate, Claire, who are living in the East Village in
Manhattan during the early 1980s—“the dead center of the Reagan years.”2
A knowledgeable and passionate rock listener, Bobby is soon introduced to
Reich’s music by Claire, who provides him with a cultural education and, even-
tually, a sexual one. The eventual outcome is an asymmetrical, bisexual ménage
à trois between the three main characters and the resulting, unconventional
family household, which devolves by the end of the novel.
Music was central to the novel’s creation, and rock songs and references to
them are threaded through it, performing a certain affective immediacy. For
Cunningham, rock music “insists that our loneliness and confusion, our wild
nights and our love affairs gone wrong, are significant subjects, worthy of guitar
riffs and drum solos. As a writer, I’ve tried to put a measure of that reckless gen-
erosity onto the printed page.”3 Reich’s music is, in contrast, not as self-evident
to its fictional listeners, for one had to “work to get the point.” The music is not

1
2 Introduction

only reminiscent of Bobby’s inertial existence in Cleveland; it is also a part of his

makeover by Claire into a cosmopolitan New Yorker. In the novel, Reich effec-
tively acts as a sign within a tiny community, a pair of downtown Manhattanites
on the margins of art worlds—Jonathan is a food critic for a successful weekly
news publication, Claire is a trust-funded bohemian jeweler and was formerly
married to a touring dancer. Their tastes crisscross the brow spectrum: in addi-
tion to being music aficionados, they attend parties, plays, and especially film
screenings at various theaters, and they frequent dive bars and hole-in-the-wall
restaurants (because of Jonathan’s work) and watch TV together, when Jonathan
isn’t seeing his lover, Erich. Reich’s music accompanies many other cultural
products and forms that bind Bobby to this new household, the wider milieu
of downtown Manhattan, and, ultimately, the familial arrangement between the
three characters that will soon emerge—three interconnected characters raising
a baby in remote, symbolically-charged Woodstock.
Music scholars may well wonder which Reich piece is being referenced here.
The description “a pulse, with tiny variations” recalls the opening and closing
“Pulses” sections of Music for 18 Musicians (1976). The 1978 ECM LP recording
of that piece famously sold more than one hundred thousand copies within a
year of its release, making this crossover hit the most likely possibility. And yet,
the descriptions of the music as “electronic [sic]” and the composer as “serenely
stuttering” are perhaps more reminiscent of Reich’s tape pieces It’s Gonna Rain
(1965) and especially Come Out (1966), both released on LP by Columbia in the
late 1960s, and also of their “sampling” techniques to which Reich would return
later that decade, beginning with Different Trains (1988).4
But perhaps the most telling word in Cunningham’s description is one of the
most banal: “variations.” The term is a marker of what one might think of as
Reich’s turn toward more conventional forms and musical forces (commissioned
solo compositions, works for full orchestra, choral pieces). It first appears in
Variations for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards (1979) and then resurfaces in a trio
of post–video opera compositions written in the first decade of the twentieth
century: You Are (Variations) (2004), Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings
(2005), and the Daniel Variations (2006). While Cunningham’s description—
“little variations laid over an ancient luxury of replication”—might sound like
a characterization of music with a more ambient sensibility than Reich’s, “vari-
ations” indexes a more traditional temporality, of longer phrases and lines that
are then subjected to transformation, perhaps in the manner of a theme and var-
iations.5 Reading against the grain of Cunningham’s rock-based understanding
of Reich, we can appreciate that a new traditionalism emerges with the onset of
this period of the composer’s music, including the composer’s own rediscovery
of text-setting and extended melodic composition in Tehillim (1981). That tra-
ditionalism resonates with his own description of the “conservative 1980s,” to
which he bade farewell by the end of the decade and to which he seemingly
returned after his last video opera with Beryl Korot, Three Tales (2002).6
Introduction 3

In retrospect, what we might call Reich’s “long 1980s”—beginning in the late

1970s, after his post–Music for 18 Musicians crisis, when he considered giving
up composition and becoming a rabbi7—launched him on a path toward le-
gitimacy in the world of mainstream classical music. Indeed, it was during the
“dead center” of the Reagan/Thatcher era that Reich firmly established himself
as one of the most important composers of the late twentieth century. Claims
such as “America’s greatest living composer,” or accolades that placed him as one
of “a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the
direction of musical history,”8 were still some way off (after all, Reich would only
turn fifty during the decade), but his music was spreading much farther outside
rather than within degree programs in music departments and schools, where
undergraduates’ staple diet of the Three Bs (and the canon more broadly) would
be supplemented by contemporary modernist music—Berio, Boulez, Babbitt, or
Birtwistle, perhaps. In fact, one was more likely to hear strains of Music for 18
Musicians or Tehillim emerging from the room of a philosophy, art history, or
English literature student—a relaxing sonic technology of the self-applied long
after the day’s classes had finished, and not as the object of analytical or histor-
ical study within the classroom.
Even during the 1980s, Reich’s music was still only grudgingly accepted by
many members of the music “establishment.” Other than the ubiquitous Clapping
Music (1972), or occasionally Music for Pieces of Wood (1973), which also re-
quired limited instrumental resources, his music remained rarely performed.
One usually had to get to New York or London to hear performances of true
quality, or hope that the composer and his ensemble would make a rare visit to
town, which was, of course, more likely in the United States. Even performers of
contemporary repertoire were reluctant to embrace his music, put off perhaps
by its rhythmic demands and austere aesthetic challenges.
There were even slimmer pickings for those who wished to research it.
A stubborn view remained that music of the so-called minimalist school of
composers—into which Reich had been unwittingly (and unwillingly) co-
opted—resisted standard forms of analysis. After all, what hidden mysteries
could be revealed in an aesthetic that was so self-reflexively transparent?
A music that, according to the composer himself, possessed no “secrets of
structure that you can’t hear”?9 Of course, Reich’s music did, in fact, possess
“secrets of structure,” as visibly demonstrated in Paul Epstein’s revelatory anal-
ysis of the phase relationships in the first section of Piano Phase, published in
Musical Quarterly in 1986.10 K. Robert Schwarz’s nuanced two-part introduc-
tion to Reich had appeared in the pages of Perspectives of New Music some six
years previously,11 followed a few years later by the English-language translation
of Wim Mertens’s influential American Minimal Music: La Monte Young, Terry
Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass,12 but on the whole it was left to music critics to
weigh up the merits of Reich’s works in their weekly dispatches, where opinions
veered from knowledgeable (Tom Johnson), supportive (Alan Rich), or both
4 Introduction

(Kyle Gann), to dismissive and hostile (Donal Henahan, Harold C. Schonberg).

No wonder Reich himself became deeply suspicious of critics and their motives.
Still, Epstein’s article opened the door for a generation of academics who
were interested in studying Reich’s music. It also marked one of the first attempts
to rethink the nature and scope of the composer’s oeuvre—to delve beneath its
outer surface in order to examine and uncover what was going on underneath,
or even to demonstrate that there was something underneath that surface to
uncover in the first place. Other articles from around the same time, including
Dan Warburton’s “A Working Terminology for Minimal Music,”13 added fur-
ther weight to the argument that minimalist music deserved scholarly study,
while others around this time looked to draw parallels between Reich’s music
and broader concerns, such as Rob Cowan’s short but insightful article on Reich
and Wittgenstein.14
It was only during the 1990s that minimalist musicology in general, and Reich’s
music in particular, fully gathered pace, however. Publications proliferated as
the decade (and century) drew to a close, and during the intervening years the
scope of Reich studies has extended to include everything from beat-class set
and information-dynamic analysis to race, gender, desire creation, and mood
regulation.15 Out of this welter of scholarly activity three main strands have
emerged. The first remains more consolidatory in approach, building and devel-
oping on primary research conducted throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Edward
Strickland’s Minimalism:Origins, published in 1993, was the first in-depth ac-
count of the movement in relation to both the fine arts and music. This was
soon followed by K. Robert Schwarz’s Minimalists, which offered an extended
treatment of Reich’s “minimalist” and “maximalist” periods. Keith Potter’s Four
Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass,16
published in 2000, bore the fruits of more than twenty years of dedicated and
detailed research, immediately establishing itself as the area’s authoritative text-
book. The second strand treats minimalist music, including Reich’s, as a topic
of involved analytical and theoretical study, often drawing on various forms of
mathematics and examining rhythmic-structural features of which the com-
poser himself was almost certainly unaware. This was the argument of Richard
Cohn in his pathbreaking essay, “Transpositional Combination of Beat-Class
Sets in Steve Reich’s Phase-Shifting Music” (1992).17 In contrast to the previous
two strands, the third drew inspiration from the “new musicology” of Susan
McClary, Ruth Solie, Lawrence Kramer, and others. Like the second strand, it
sought to understand Reich’s music less, perhaps, in relation to what the com-
poser was stating, but unlike both other strands, it prioritized the rich layers
of meaning and signifying potential the composer’s music offers to interested
listeners.
One early example of the third scholarly tendency was Robert Fink’s “Going
Flat: Post-hierarchical Music Theory and the Musical Surface,” which provided
the would-be researcher with new tools for analyzing twentieth-century music,
including minimalism. Like Epstein some ten years previously, Fink also looked
Introduction 5

to Piano Phase. However, this time the piece was used to support an argument
that revolved around questions relating to the relevance and usefulness of es-
tablished analytical methods, with their emphasis on hierarchical structures,
linear descents, levels of contrapuntal stratification, and implied distinction be-
tween surface and depth. Such methods did not hold sway when it came to
analyzing minimalist works like Reich’s piece, which served as an object lesson
on the problem of musical analysis in general: “The virtual coincidence of back-
ground and foreground progressions makes the voice-leading structure of Piano
Phase almost totally non-hierarchic, totally flat. The backdrop has become the
curtain.”18
Fink’s “Going Flat” appeared in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist’s ed-
ited volume, Rethinking Music, which could be said to have set in motion
Oxford University Press’s “rethinking” quasi-series. Whether stated or im-
plied, much of what is contained in this latest collection in the series is in-
formed by developments in musicology that took place around this time. By
the early twenty-first century, the rate of productivity in Reich studies merited
a biobibliography by David J. Hoek (2002), which included an annotated list
of publications in English, French, German, and Italian. Hoek’s book certainly
offered an important snapshot of the then current state of research on Reich, but
one imagines that it would now be at least twice its original size were it updated
to include research completed in the following seventeen years, from doctoral
dissertations to journal articles, many of which appear in the works cited at the
end of this volume. However, pace the composer’s own Writings on Music, 1965–
2000, edited by Paul Hillier, only one book-length account focusing entirely on
Reich’s music has been produced to date.19 This volume attempts to redress this
imbalance.
It remains true that practice often precedes theory, and musicology
represents only one area where Reich’s music has been rethought, reappraised,
and reinterpreted. True, his music has always connected beyond the concert hall
and lecture theater, but few would have predicted back in the 1970s or 1980s the
extent to which it has penetrated aspects of today’s media and popular culture.
Reich is now frequently heard on television and film, in dramatic contexts and
situations that might shock and intrigue the composer and regular listeners of
his music.20 To take three examples, we first return to the Cunningham pas-
sage discussed earlier, but as it appears in the 2004 film version of A Home at
the End of the World. In the film, Claire (played by Robin Wright) puts on the
Reich recording, and she and Bobby (Colin Farrell) hear section VI of Music
for 18 Musicians. After about ten seconds of a medium close-up shot of Bobby
reacting to the music, the film dissolves to another scene in which Jonathan
(Dallas Roberts) is walking home, on the sidewalk. He passes a man who is
walking his dog, and both cross in front of a third man sitting on a stoop.
The two walking men make measured, balletic turns back toward each other
and stare—they are checking each other out—while the seated man watches
Jonathan. Having transformed from diegetic to nondiegetic music, the pulsating
6 Introduction

maracas, the syncopated F♯ minor groove, and especially the throbbing chordal
piano parts21 of Reich’s composition here animate and express the queer sexual
desire represented in the scene, which prefigures the erotic undercurrents that
will affect the lives of the three principal characters and hints at the histories
of promiscuity and lack of exercising “bodily precautions” that will result in
Jonathan’s contraction of AIDS.22
A second example is found in a scene from episode 9 of the third series of
British teen drama series Skins, first aired in 2009, in which the opening pulses
from Music for 18 Musicians play underneath a heated argument between twin
sisters Katie and Emily (Megan and Kathryn Prescott) about each other’s sexual
identity and inability to form and sustain long-term relationships. The music
ends suddenly during the following scene when Naomi, Emily’s onetime girl-
friend, arrives at the sisters’ house. On the surface, the music signifies the “passing
of time,” acting as a transition from one scene to the next, but on a deeper level
it implies something more: the tangled internal thoughts of Katie and Emily
and their ongoing psychological battle. Each chordal repetition—signifying its
original and copy, statement and duplication—emphasizes the siblings’ struggle
and sense of striving for identity (made even more obvious at the beginning of
the episode when Emily goes to college disguised as her sister), as the two are
again confronted by mirror opposites of themselves, both strangely familiar yet
irreducibly different. The music’s continuous weave of interlocking patterns also
adds to the scene’s physical and psychological entanglement.
The third example, from the initial chase and fight scene in the main event
of The Hunger Games (2012), also uses Reich’s trademark pulsing technique,
this time from the opening of his Three Movements for orchestra. As the games
officially begin, the heroine, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), observes
the combatants around her fighting and killing one another, while others at-
tempt to grab supplies before fleeing. The nondiegetic music is initially sparse: it
consists of a few ringing tones—carefully sculpted sonorities reminiscent of
bowed cymbals or the decay of a rung bell. The pulses enter only once Katniss’s
adrenaline kicks in, and she gets into a kind of survival-mode “flow” state, doing
what she can to stay alive, gain valuable resources, and escape the bloodcurdling
slaughter taking place around her. The scene presents a clearly dysphoric use
of the composer’s music and thus makes one think about the disquieting and
discomfiting pulses in that piece, or others, such as the openings of the closely
related Sextet (1985) and the comparable large-scale composition The Desert
Music (1984). It also suggests a sense of altered time consciousness, in which
time both slows down and speeds up for the characters at that moment, and
hence links up with the extensive meditations—including Reich’s own—on the
perception of temporality in minimalism.23
Both examples tap into the dark undertow of Reich’s harmonic language,
going against more common employments of his music that emphasize ec-
static or pleasurable modes, especially those of advertisements or film scores
Introduction 7

that often imitate his pulsing technique. They also connect with broader
tendencies in recent Hollywood cinema to employ postminimalist styles to
signal modalities of mourning, profundity, closure, sublimity, and (in the case
of spiritual minimalism) enlightenment and transcendence.24 Indeed, both indi-
cate more complex and varied responses to Reich’s work in general, as shown in
projects such as Reich Remixed, released in 1999, which features arrangements
of the composer’s back catalog by electronic dance music producers such as DJ
Spooky and Coldcut, and the composer’s more recent Radio Rewrite, which
takes preexisting material from two songs by British rock group Radiohead as
its starting point.
* * *
You had to work to get the point of him. Cunningham’s words—as Bobby’s—
at the opening of this introduction also offer an opportunity to reflect on the
contributions in this volume. At second glance, those words remind us that
Reich’s music is, ultimately, not easy-listening fare, irrespective of how it can
be used or of its partly meditative affordances. One thinks of Michael Tilson
Thomas’s infamous statement prior to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s first
performance of Four Organs in 1971: “it’s a piece . . . for virtuoso listeners.”25
Indeed, and taking Bobby’s formulation as a cue, we should consider the work
(labor, methodology, sources/materials) involved in understanding the point
(meaning, purpose, ideas, goal) of Reich’s music, as gleaned by any individual
listener, virtuoso or not.
With respect to its “point,” we want to underscore that the composer’s music
cannot be reduced to single, simple meanings or be used in uniform and wholly
consistent ways, as the filmic and televisual repurposings discussed here clearly
illustrate. That is, there isn’t just one point. In the chapters that follow, a variety
of perspectives and purposes can be found, ranging from those drawing on crit-
ical musicological standpoints (to which we alluded earlier) to more traditional
efforts to reconstruct aspects of the composer’s creative process. All of these
perspectives are welcome and vitally important, for they contribute a wealth of
knowledge and learning that complements Reich’s own. This is crucial, not only
because Reich is the most critically esteemed composer emerging from the min-
imalist tendency but also because he is minimalism’s most authoritative theorist,
as well as one of the most lucid writers about his own work (widely apparent
since the publication of his Writings about Music in 1974, a collection of essays
that was later republished as part of a larger collection in 2002 called Writings
on Music, 1965–2000).26 His landmark text “Music as a Gradual Process” (1968)
is an eloquent and persuasive quasi-manifesto that has, often wrongly, come to
stand in as a descriptor of the entire practice of musical minimalism, and his no-
nonsense accounts of his compositions and comments in published interviews
leave the reader with the impression that little, if anything, remains to be said
about his music.
8 Introduction

Nothing could be further from the truth. As many of the chapters in this book
demonstrate, the gap between Reich’s discourse and his practice is sometimes ex-
tensive, and at times his words can obfuscate more complex realities and conten-
tious ideologies that lie under the surface of his music. Of course, many artists
develop idiosyncratic rationales for their creative practices and often feel the need
to conceal aspects of their work and personal lives, in order to maintain their pri-
vacy, confirm their stature, and reinforce or advance their position within the cul-
tural field; as Walter Benjamin famously (and hyperbolically) noted of Goethe, “To
wish to gain an understanding of [his novel] Elective Affinities from the author’s
own words on the subject is wasted effort. For it is precisely their aim to forbid ac-
cess to critique.”27 With this caveat in mind, Reich should be viewed as no different
from many other artists, and yet the lack of an established critical discourse has
meant that Reich’s own words have effectively filled and continue to fill the gap.
As for the “work” involved in this book’s contributions, this, too, ranges
widely, encompassing sketch studies (including their digital variants), discourse
analysis and reception history, hermeneutic investigations, intertextual studies
(incorporating non-Western, popular, and Western art musics), the clarifying of
historical timelines and contexts, harmonic and formal analysis, philosophical
and religious ruminations, and deep archival digging. The last of these schol-
arly activities requires mention of the acquisition of the Steve Reich Collection
by the Paul Sacher Foundation (PSS), Basel (since 2008), which has greatly
facilitated and inspired new research on Reich. Most chapters in this volume
have benefited in some way from access to sketchbooks, letters, program notes,
article reviews, computer files, and other materials housed at the PSS. One ima-
gines that its contents would have been very different without this invaluable
resource, and we are grateful for its continued support of our efforts.
Rethinking Reich is divided into four parts, each containing three or four
chapters broadly relating to the area (or areas) in question. Part I focuses on
political, aesthetic, and analytical concerns from a number of perspectives.
Sumanth Gopinath’s chapter takes as its starting point the infamous Carnegie
Hall performance of Reich’s Four Organs on January 18, 1973. Reading against
the backdrop of the late 1960s social, political, racial, and artistic climate,
Gopinath provides a range of hermeneutic readings of the work’s rhythmic, col-
oristic, and formal dimensions, including the notion that its augmentation pro-
cess functions as a trope for—among other things—space travel and exploration.
Ap Siôn’s chapter looks at a work written near the end of the 1970s, suggesting
that Octet (or Eight Lines, as it subsequently became known) represents a shift
in Reich’s aesthetic toward a more European way of thinking, which has been
partly obscured by the composer’s wish to foreground the importance of Jewish
influences and Hebrew chant. The other two chapters in this part offer different
perspectives on Reich’s more politically motivated works, with Maarten Beirens
drawing on sketch materials at PSS to try to make sense of the complex structure
of Different Trains and The Cave, while Ryan Ebright’s chapter contextualizes the
Introduction 9

latter work in terms of its attempts to produce an Americanized vision of Arab-

Israeli reconciliation.
Part II draws together three contrasting responses to issues of speech, repe-
tition, and identity in Reich’s music. Robert Fink’s chapter uses the composer’s
musical logocentrism in The Cave—or a compositional preoccupation with the
word as a kind of ideal—to tease out broader issues relating to religious iden-
tity and meaning, complexified by the composer’s word-saturated operatic lan-
guage. Speech of a different kind informs John Pymm’s survey of the prehistory
of Come Out, where he seeks to show how a more nuanced understanding of
this important early work can be aided by studying the composer’s sound col-
lage Harlem’s Six Condemned, which was also performed at the tape piece’s pre-
miere in 1966. More than forty years separate Come Out and WTC 9/11, which
forms the basis for Celia Casey’s investigation of Reich’s “docu-music” style, yet
both Pymm’s and Casey’s chapters draw on a range of recorded sound materials
housed at PSS in order to rethink the music’s original function and intention.
Part III consists of four chapters whose findings rely primarily on research
conducted at the archive. Matthias Kassel, director of the Steve Reich Collection,
outlines the diverse range of resources kept there, and the challenges facing
both scholar and archivist in dealing with “hybrid-analog” and “hybrid-digital”
materials, followed by three chapters that concentrate mainly on the composer’s
sketchbooks and e-sketches. Keith Potter reconsiders the harmonic content
of Reich’s breakthrough work, Music for 18 Musicians, in the light of various
sketches of its opening chord sequence. David Chapman traces the evolution
of Piano Phase from an essentially improvised piece to a fixed work through a
comparison of draft sketches, sound recordings, and other data relating to early
performances, while Twila Bakker reviews Reich’s work in the 1980s by focusing
on the composer’s set of Counterpoint pieces as seen through rhetorical shifts
and reception tropes, on the one hand, and computer files and e-sketches, on
the other.
Part IV moves away from matters of compositional strategy to questions
about the numerous non-Western influences on the composer’s music. Reich
has been quick to acknowledge his debt to African and Balinese music and cul-
tural practice, maintaining at the same time that his intention was never to imi-
tate them but to create a music with its own, unique sound that was nevertheless
“constructed in the light of one’s knowledge of non-Western structures.”28 Martin
Scherzinger’s chapter both maps out a detailed ethnographic context in which
to understand Reich’s extensive appropriation of African influences—including
the very notion of phasing itself—and examines how these elements are shaped
together in Electric Counterpoint. Michael Tenzer offers parallel reflections in
relation to Balinese music, with which the composer did not engage to the same
degree as music from the African continent. Kerry O’Brien’s concluding chapter
addresses the inherent paradox between freedom and control that lies at the
foundations of the composer’s musical language, revealing how yogic principles
10 Introduction

and practices during the early 1970s directed Reich toward a new compositional
aesthetic that was to manifest itself in Music for 18 Musicians.
Cutting across these divisions is a concern central to many, if not all, of the
chapters in Rethinking Reich: namely, the problem of musical meaning and her-
meneutics. The subject is a troublesome one for the composer, who, as both ap
Siôn and O’Brien remind us, received and responded to interpretive critiques
during the mid-1970s from German-language writers like Clytus Gottwald and
others who were influenced by the work of the philosopher and musicologist
Theodor Adorno. Well before that experience, Reich seems to have been al-
ready disinclined to cognize music through imagistic ideation and favored a
certain Wittgenstein- and process-art-influenced manner of straightforward,
unadorned description in lieu of the hermeneutics language game; as he put
it in one interview, music “doesn’t have a verbal translation.”29 But the German
experience left a bad taste in his mouth, which may resonate with his later
critique of Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music: “One could say of Adorno, he
invents meaningless intellectual jargon to justify the simple fact that he likes
Schönberg and doesn’t like Stravinsky.”30 The hermeneutics on offer in this
volume, however, are largely not Adornian in tone or perspective (perhaps with
the exception of Tenzer’s Balinese expert listeners, who seem to disdain slow
repetition just as much as the philosopher did) but rather orient themselves to
particular musical geographies and creative practices (Africa for Scherzinger,
Bali for Tenzer, Europe for ap Siôn, experimental improvisation for Chapman,
documentary-cinematic auteurism for Casey), to specific historical contexts
(1960s space travel and political upheavals for Gopinath, 1980s US political
conservatism for Bakker, the Israel-Palestine conflict in the 1980s and early
1990s for Ebright), and to alternative philosophical perspectives (Hindu-yogic
for O’Brien, Derridean for Fink). In some cases, the same musical examples are
interpreted from strikingly different perspectives, offering a textbook demon-
stration of the Althusserian idea of “overdetermination,” or that there are mul-
tiple points of origin or causality for a given phenomenon.31 And even when the
word “hermeneutic” doesn’t really apply to particular chapters, as might be the
case for Potter’s and Beirens’s harmonic analyses and sketch studies, Kassel’s ar-
chival reflections, or Pymm’s historical contextualization, we still find moments
that surprise us: Reich’s conceptualization and working-out of the harmony for
Music for 18 Musicians from the top and middle downward, rather than up from
the bass, or his conscientious royalty payment arrangement with Daniel Hamm
for using his recorded voice in Come Out.
In the last instance, that should be the purpose of the necessarily specula-
tive art of musical hermeneutics: to surprise us, to help us reimagine what we
thought we knew well, to shake our foundations and leave us with new ideas and
ways of forming them—and, if we’re lucky, newly attained wisdom. Whether
or not we want to follow Lawrence Kramer and argue that hermeneutics is
foundational to the formation of the modern subject, a fundamental mode of
Introduction 11

post-Enlightenment knowing that provides an alternative to both dogmatism

and empiricism, we can agree with Reich that its purpose should not be to ra-
tionalize mere polemics of taste.32 Rather, the goal is to deepen one’s under-
standing of and engagement with music. Conducted with both critical integrity
and the spirit of generosity, the interpretation of musical meaning can provide
a powerful means of rethinking music, including Reich’s, without indiscrim-
inately wielding words as weapons or confusing personal tastes with politics.
* * *
An ancient luxury of replication. This phrase in Cunningham’s passage is poetic
but also puzzling. One the one hand, it refers explicitly to a seemingly long-ago
period of slowness in Bobby’s life in Cleveland, in contrast with the new speed
and intensity of his New York existence. As a description of Reich’s music, how-
ever, it is suggestive. “Replication” is a homological equivalent of musical repe-
tition, which maps onto Bobby’s earlier, repetitive work as a baker; “luxury” is
tied to beauty, comfort, and pleasure, applied here to the now-elusive slowness
of time in fast-paced New York; “ancient” refers to the distant past, although
given Bobby’s recent relocation as narrated in this novel it might be read as
“(seemingly) ancient.” What is, then, seemingly ancient about Reich’s music?
Possibilities might include his abjuring of complex electronic technologies
during the 1970s in favor of familiar acoustic instruments, and, more broadly,
his reliance on older musical reference points, both Western and non-Western,
which weave their way into his music and rationalizations about it.33
An ideal of ancientness, of rooting one’s practice in something that is
very old and therefore arguably durable, is one dimension of what Reich
understands as his contribution to his generation’s musical counterrevolu-
tionary “restoration.”34 And a related component of that restoration is his com-
mitment to the aesthetic discourse of beauty and the apparent concomitant
belief that Western art music, historically, was once beautiful and then—due to
twelve-tone and serialist modernism—became ugly.35 Reich knows, of course,
that beautiful and ugly are “political words.”36 And one might argue that, with
the increasingly conservative critical impetus of some of his later music, Reich
has at times embraced a certain aesthetic ugliness for communicative effect.37
All of this notwithstanding, both the power and the attraction of Reich’s music
are indelibly bound up with its ability to afford listening pleasure—which, as
Fredric Jameson reminded us long ago, is a complex political issue.38 In light of
which, our ambition is for this book to stimulate both critical and hedonistic
impulses and, ideally, their dialectical intertwining. We encourage the reader
to luxuriate in listening to Reich’s music, returning to old favorites, exploring
less familiar works, and discovering relatively obscure compositions, many of
which deserve careful study but have not received it in this volume—such as
Reich’s Duet (1993), a beautiful, pastorally inflected piece dedicated to Yehudi
Menuhin and the composer’s take on the barococo string concerto that had a
hand in inspiring minimalist music in the first place.39 We are confident that
12 Introduction

reading, expounding upon, and arguing with the fourteen chapters of this book
will instigate new critical understandings of Reich’s music, perhaps including
insights into the very pleasure that it offers.
The recent wave of scholarship enabled by the Sacher archive demarcates
a turning point for those interested in examining and evaluating Steve Reich’s
music anew, but if there is truth in the claim that he is “America’s greatest
living composer,” then part of his music’s greatness must surely lie in its ability
to elicit a rich and diverse range of responses from critics, scholars, listeners,
and performers alike. We hope that the present volume will achieve its modest
aim of offering a thoughtful and provocative aid in rehearing, revisiting, and
rethinking a body of music that will continue to seize the imaginations of
listeners for years to come.

Notes

1. Cunningham 1998, 147–48.

2. Ibid., 126.
3. Michael Cunningham, liner notes to the film soundtrack to A Home at the
End of the World (2004).
4. A more explicit example of “serene stuttering” can be found in Alvin Lucier’s
I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), in which the composer famously uses a repetitive,
recursive process to “smooth out [the] irregularities” of his speech impediment.
Lucier’s work is likely influenced by Come Out, a work he heard and admired early
on. See Lucier 2012, 103–5. Also, see Robert Fink’s chapter in this volume for a dis-
cussion of the stuttering effect in Reich’s The Cave (1993). On the composer’s sam-
pling practice, see Reich 2002b, 201; Potter 2000, 169.
5. Reich generally is displeased by characterizations of his music as am-
bient; one of the editors recalls a testy answer by Reich to a question about the
relevance of ambient music to his own work at the 2005 Mannes Institute at the
Mannes School of Music, New York, on June 26. Many thanks to Wayne Alpern for
facilitating that editor’s attendance at the event. In relation to this, see the following
quote from an interview with Jonathan Cott: “You know, some critics of my earlier
pieces thought I was intending to create some kind of ‘hypnotic’ or ‘trance’ music.
And I always thought, ‘No, no, no, no, I want you to be wide awake and hear details
you’ve never heard before!’ People listen to things any way they wish, of course, and
I don’t have anything to say about it, even if I have written the pieces. But I actually
prefer the music to be heard by somebody who’s totally wide awake, hearing more
than he or she usually does, rather than by someone who’s just spaced-out and
receiving a lot of ephemeral impressions” (Reich 2002b, 129). In contrast, Reich
frequently invokes the discourse of and term “variation”; for example, in his dis-
cussion of Variations he notes that the piece is based “on an harmonic progression
somewhat in the manner of a chaconne” (2002b, 99). Also see Ivanovitch 2010 for
Introduction 13

a discussion of the notion of variation and a nonstatic reconceptualization of the

theme-and-variation form.
6. Schwarz 1996, 93. On Tehillim’s traditionalism, see Reich 2002b, 101.
7. See Reich 1987a, 67; Potter 2000, 152.
8. The first, by Kyle Gann, was first published in an article in the Village Voice in
1999. The second, by Guardian critic Andrew Clements, prefaced Reich’s appearance
as “Composer of the Week” on BBC Radio 3 in October 2010 (both quotes feature
prominently on the composer’s wiki page). Citations describing Reich as the United
States’ “greatest living composer” can also be found in the “Biography” section of his
website, at http://stevereich.com (accessed August 2, 2017).
9. Reich 2002b, 35. For a thought-provoking series of reflections on this
problem, see Quinn 2006.
10. Epstein 1986, 494–502.
11. Schwarz 1980–81, 373–92; 1981–82, 225–86.
12. Mertens 1983.
13. Warburton 1988.
14. Cowan 1986.
15. For an overview of the analysis of minimalist music, see T. Evans 2013, 241–58.
16. Potter 2000.
17. Cohn 1992.
18. Fink 1999, 126–27. Fink’s perspective here contrasts with previous analytical
attempts by Epstein (explicitly) and Cohn (implicitly) to find analytical “depth” in
minimalist music, as part of a broader attempt to “retire the surface–depth meta-
phor” (102). Our provisional and incomplete solution, discussed later in this in-
troduction and consonant with Fink’s other work on minimalism (especially Fink
2005), is to coax the debate away from analysis alone and towards hermeneutics
(with both being intimately related as “gnostic” undertakings, as argued in Abbate
2004). In his measured defense of gnostic inquiry vis-à-vis minimalist music, Quinn
(2006) notes, “if we are to get anywhere, we will need to fantasize” (293). We couldn’t
agree more; among other things, this volume is a collective effort of informed, stu-
dious fantasy in response to Reich’s music.
19. Hartenberger 2016; Reich 2002b.
20. Rebecca Eaton (2013) points out that the experimental films the composer
was involved in during the 1960s “effectively marked the end of Reich’s fledgling ca-
reer as a film composer” and that, given his lack of interest in scoring films, directors
have increasingly “embraced [the] option [of] licensing Reich’s music for film and
television shows” (183). In the latter capacity, she also mentions two films using
Reich’s music, A Home at the End of the World (2004) and The Dying Gaul (2005), as
well as the show So You Think You Can Dance (2009).
21. See the repeated i4/3–v7 Aeolian mode progression in mm. 396–97 (Reich
2000, 119). The piano chords enter just as the two walking men see each other, and
their turns and stares coincide with the chords’ crescendo—creating a striking de-
piction of sexual arousal and waxing desire, along with a tinge of foreboding.
14 Introduction

22. Cunningham 1998, 174. Two other films, The Dying Gaul (2005) and C.O.G.
(2013), also employ Reich’s music while directly exploring problems of gay male sex-
uality and identity. For more on Reich and film, see Gopinath and ap Siôn 2017.
23. For two very different reflections on time in minimalist music, see J. Kramer
1988, 375–97; Fink 2005b, 25–61.
24. See, for example, Dies 2013; Maimets-Volt 2013.
25. Cited in Strickland 1993, 221. The BSO’s second performance of Four
Organs, at Carnegie Hall in 1973, led to an infamous riot. For more information on
that event, see Gopinath’s chapter in this volume.
26. See Reich 1974 and Reich 2002b, respectively.
27. Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in Benjamin 1996, 313.
28. Reich 2002b, 71 (emphasis in original).
29. For the full context of this quote, see the following, from Kessler 1998: “When
I was first giving concerts in Germany in the early to middle seventies, people
attacked [my] music as mechanical and said it didn’t have a language, in a sense of
a discursive language. I remember a letter I wrote to this guy in Stuttgart about it.
I said that I don’t think that (Beethoven’s 5th motive) ‘da da da daaa’ is fate knocking
at the door, I think that it’s an incredible four-note motive, that what’s remarkable
is that it continues through the scherzo and into the last movement. It’s the mo-
tive; it’s not really a melody, it’s a beginning of motivic organization, as opposed to
introducing an imaginary text into music, and saying ‘Well, what does it mean?’ The
opening motive in the Fifth Symphony is four notes followed by four more. That’s
what it means. It doesn’t have a verbal translation. Some people would say that it had
a philosophical idea which he then translated into music. I think that’s absurd.” In
other interviews, including Duffie 2010, Reich emphasizes his relative inability to
think imagistically, particularly in relation to music.
30. Reich 2002b, 185. Also see Adorno 2006.
31. See the essay “Overdetermination and Contradiction,” in Althusser 1969.
32. Kramer’s point here is nonetheless quite compelling. See L. Kramer 2011,
2–3, 6, and passim. And, of course, for Adorno, the stakes were much higher than
taste polemics, which is why music scholars still care about what he had to say about
music, even when he was at his most tendentious. For a useful overview of these
matters, see Richard Leppert’s introduction to Adorno 2009. See also Paddison 1997.
33. See, for example, Reich 2002b, 107, in which he speaks of his “desire for an-
cient tradition and religious practice”—ancientness and spirituality also being pro-
foundly connected for Reich.
34. “I constantly say to people, ‘What we did was not a revolution—this was
a restoration.’ The music we were brought up in school to imitate—the music of
Boulez and Stockhausen—had become what we call mannerist. That doesn’t mean
the music was bad. It just means that it had gotten so recherche that it put itself off
in a corner. With just a tiny coterie listening to it” (Harris 2016).
35. For example, as he famously notes in a 1973 essay on his ensemble, “The
main issue is what’s happening musically; is this beautiful, is this sending chills up
and down my spine or isn’t it?” (Reich 2002b, 80).
Introduction 15

36. “One could also say, with some justification, that frequently ‘beautiful’ and
‘ugly’ are political words.” In Reich 2002b, 186.
37. One starting point for this trend might include the second movement of
Different Trains, and the sonic harshness of parts of City Life also comes to mind.
Both foreshadow comparably nonbeautiful passages in Three Tales and WTC 9/11.
38. See Jameson 1989, 61–74. Following Jameson, we might see Reich’s invoca-
tion of beauty as a form of aesthetic hedonism analogous to left hedonism during
the long 1960s (as per the New Left and poststructuralist theory, particularly after
Barthes); the aesthetic puritanism of musical high modernism would then correlate
to left puritanism (which is the dominant strain in the Marxist tradition).
39. See Fink 2005b, 169–207; Reich 2002b, 183, in which the composition seems
to be misdated to 1994. Numerous fine performances of Duet can be found on
YouTube as of this writing.
I
POLITICAL, AESTHETIC,
AND ANALYTICAL CONCERNS
1

“Departing to Other Spheres”

Psychedelic Science Fiction, Perspectival Embodiment, and
the Hermeneutics of Steve Reich’s Four Organs

Sumanth Gopinath

A quartet of four tiny electric organs, backed by the unvaried pulse

of four maracas players, is the scoring. Reich has, for this ensemble,
taken a chord, played by the four organs, and kept it going for some 20
minutes[.] Presumably the idea is for the listener to saturate himself in
the pure sound, concentrating, departing to other spheres on a cloud of
musical Zen.[ . . . ]
What Reich has done is confuse an acoustic phenomenon with music.
As such, “Four Organs” is non-music, just as so many minor baroque
compositions, written in tonic-dominant formulae without a trace of
personality, are non-music. Or as so much modern art is non-art—three
white triangles against a white background, or something like that. But it
fools a lot of people because all of this comes under the general heading
of “art.” Really it is “art” for people who are afraid of “art.” Or do not un-
derstand what art really is. Or who are too emotionally inhibited to want
to share the emotional and intellectual processes of a real creator’s mind.
“Four Organs” is baby stuff, written by an innocent for innocents.

So pronounced the eminent New York Times music critic Harold Schonberg
only a couple of weeks after attending, and then reviewing, one of the most
infamous concerts in the history of musical minimalism.* Having received the

* Versions of this essay were given as talks. Thanks to faculty and graduate students
at the Ohio State University; scholars at a one-day Reich study session at Kings
Place, London; Ron Rodman and his students at Carleton College; faculty and
graduate students at Harvard University; Matthew McDonald and his students at
Northeastern University; Rob Haskins; and faculty, graduate students, and other
attendees at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Michigan, the University
of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the University of Minnesota, and
Yale University. Thanks to Bridget Carr at the Boston Symphony Orchestra archives
and Rob Hudson at the Carnegie Hall Archives. Thanks to Benjamin Givan for a

19
20 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

Pulitzer Prize in the previous year for his music criticism, Schonberg was surely
emboldened when writing snide dismissals of late modernist and experimen-
talist US-American composers like Elliott Carter, John Cage, and Steve Reich; in
the same article, he advocates for the future of art music as represented by British
composer Peter Maxwell Davies’s polystylistic and multimediatic work Vesalii
Icones (1969).1 The performance at which Schonberg had heard Four Organs
(1970) was part of a series of “Spectrum” concerts with a casually attired Boston
Symphony Orchestra (BSO). The music on the program spanned the centuries
and was conducted by rising star Michael Tilson Thomas. It was a milestone for
the series, which would make this concert its first in Carnegie Hall, in New York,
on Thursday, January 18, 1973. The theme was “a concert of musical multiples,”
and the program included Hexaméron (1837), a virtuoso collaborative work of
six variations on Bellini’s “March of the Puritans” from I puritani (1835) that
was composed by Liszt and by five of the other greatest pianists of the early
to mid-nineteenth century. Each composer-pianist contributed a variation (in-
cluding Thalberg, Czerny, and Chopin), and Liszt subsequently also wrote an
introduction and finale, as well as connecting interludes. Although the work
was originally written as a solo piano composition, on this occasion six pianists
performed Liszt’s arrangement for piano and orchestra—at times separately, at
others together, and all while accompanied by the BSO—and perhaps sought to
embody the meeting of piano heroes that never took place in the composition’s
contemporaneous moment.2
As Reich ruefully later noted, “[For] the kind of listener who’s going to get
off on that, and who’s coming to the BSO subscription series[,] the last thing in
the world that person is going to want to hear is my Four Organs . . . but there
it was.”3 Almost predictably, the audience—at least, its experienced rather than
“innocent” members4—began to sound their displeasure about five minutes
into the performance, and the noise grew over the remaining three quarters of
this slow rendition (the piece is usually about fifteen to sixteen minutes long),
with a variety of audience members’ responses entering unconfirmed into
the mythology surrounding the concert. Some audience members were seen
“brandishing” their “umbrellas,”5 and some yelled for the music to stop. Some
booed while others cheered. Infamously, an elderly woman supposedly banged

tip on searching the Boston Symphony Orchestra players, and to BSO percussionist
Frank Epstein for his generous responses to my inquiries. Many thanks to Russell
Hartenberger for his insights on and support for my work, and thanks to Will Robin,
Phil Kline, Arthur Press, Joan La Barbara, Greg Dubinsky, and Judy Sherman for
further help. Thanks to the Oral History of American Music at Yale University
for continuing to support my studies of Reich. Whenever possible, in this chapter
I’ve also included thanks to commentators on specific points; I apologize for any
omissions, which are unintentional.
“Departing to Other Spheres” 21

her shoe on the stage in protest, and another person (possibly the same woman)
screamed, “All right—I’ll confess!”6 Tilson Thomas, who performed the work
along with Reich and other BSO members, had to wrest order from the growing
chaos; as he recently commented: “I was playing away, and at the top of my
voice I was yelling ‘19, 20, 21, 22’. . . Seriously, that’s in no way an exaggeration.”7
Reich was crestfallen after the experience and wondered if the ensemble had
been able to stay together, but Tilson Thomas told him: “Forget about that. This
has been a historical event.”8 In his article, Schonberg was clearly on the side of
the detractors. Still, in his earlier concert review he admitted that Reich’s com-
position had touched a nerve, which led Schonberg to muse, “At least there was
some excitement in the hall, which is more than can be said when most avant-
garde music is being played.”9 The event has been likened to the riot in Paris at
the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring almost sixty years earlier (on May
29, 1913), with Nijinsky’s attempts to keep the dancers together in the face of
the noise by shouting out numbers being uncannily recalled by Tilson Thomas’s
efforts; one might also think of the protests at the Newport Folk Festival against
Bob Dylan’s electrified blues band on July 25, 1965, only seven and a half years
beforehand.10 Although no audio apparently exists of the Carnegie concert, the
combination of cheering and boos captured on the recording of the “trial run”
for it in Boston, on October 9, 1971, clearly demonstrates that, as the speaker
puts it, there was “a difference of opinion in the audience.”11
Schonberg and his audience have, in retrospect, been swept aside by the in-
exorable march of historical “progress” as musical minimalism, and particularly
Reich’s brand of it, have entered the increasingly capacious and seemingly ir-
relevant canon of Western musical history, especially that of an implicitly na-
tionalist history written with an American accent.12 Four Organs is pivotal in
this development. As Tilson Thomas predicted, the extremity of reaction to the
piece at the Carnegie concert led to it being far and away the most commented-
upon composition by the composer to that date, and the controversy thus vir-
tually guaranteed him a foothold in the art-musical canon, which would be
confirmed by a series of important compositions produced during the same
decade: the lengthy and ambitious Drumming (1971); Clapping Music (1972)
for its eminently performable and anthologizable one-page simplicity; and his
most-praised composition, Music for 18 Musicians (1976). Reich subsequently
began composing for known soloists and ensembles besides his own, soon re-
ceived commissions, and by the late 1980s was an established and much-lauded
US art-music composer. Despite all of this, Four Organs has yet to receive an
extended scholarly interpretation. The work’s presumed radicalism appears to
have encouraged formalist descriptions and readings, and scholars have largely
followed Reich’s lead in discussing the work’s most obvious technical details: that
is, an extended dominant chord, rhythmically augmented and transformed into
a sequence of single notes. Indeed, as Virginia Anderson argues, the work was
taken up as an exemplar by British systems composers in the 1970s precisely
22 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

“because they understood it as a structural game.”13 And yet, taking a cue

from Robert Fink’s eliciting of interpretive meanings from hostile journalistic
reactions to minimalism,14 we might note that Schonberg’s criticism was not en-
tirely inapt. He emphasized that the ensemble was a self-described “rock organ
quartet” (a descriptor that has figured less prominently in recent discussions of
the work), he interpreted it as being detached from an individual creator’s mind,
and he characterized its effect in distinctly aerial terms.
In the remainder of this chapter, I will examine a series of signifiers in the
composition, including some specific, if hypothetical, intertextual linkages that
might help to generate a plausible, historically informed reading of the piece,
representing a line of inquiry that resonates with Schonberg’s observations. One
may attempt a speculative recovery in part by listening to the 1960s US/UK
pop/rock music indexed by the ensemble’s composition; to contemporaneous
post-bop jazz with which Reich was certainly familiar; and, in one case, to a tel-
evision soundtrack whose score would ultimately transform into a chestnut of
popular culture. In attending to the composition’s peculiar instrumentation, its
rhythmic-metrical patterns, and its overall trajectory, we might emerge from the
endeavor with a narrative of interest and, ideally, adequate to the strong reactions
the work evoked more than forty years ago. I will proceed by breaking the score
down into constituent moments, contextualizing and provisionally interpreting
them one at a time, before synthesizing these observations at the end.

Moment 1: Measure 0, 0:00–0:02

The piece begins with eleven eighth-note beats on the maracas (usually a
single player), at ♪ = 200.15 Russell Hartenberger and Jim Cotter both argue
that the constant maracas pulse may have been influenced by its presence in
the music of the blind experimental composer and musician Moondog (Louis
Hardin), who knew and made recordings with Reich and Philip Glass in the
late 1960s.16 But in the context of popular music, the maracas signify the sound
of much 1960s pop/rock, which had absorbed it from Latin musical influences
(often to imitate or reference them), particularly the Cuban and Puerto Rican
rumba, and from Mexican mariachi bands (the latter also a topos in country
music). Few top 20 hits of the 1950s included it, although Bo Diddley’s “Say
Man” was a notable exception.17 Intriguingly, the Rolling Stones picked up
on Diddley’s maraca use in their cover of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,”
which uses the Bo Diddley beat; from there on, a number of their 1960s hits,
including “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (1968) and “Sympathy for the Devil” (1968),
featured the maracas—perhaps leading other bands to get in on the act, like
The Who in “Magic Bus” (1968).18 Although Western art composers certainly
incorporated the maracas in the twentieth century, again often for exotic ef-
fect, classical percussionists typically hold the instrument horizontally, with
“Departing to Other Spheres” 23

their hands on top, maximizing control for differentiated attacks.19 In con-

trast, both in Four Organs and in rock, the maracas are held vertically, with
relatively quickly repeated eighth notes that are articulated consistently, so
that the quieter half-divisions of these beats are heard as well. (By way of con-
trast, it’s worth attending to the way that the BSO percussionists played Four
Organs in 1971, at a slower ♪ = 193 and the resulting mushiness in articula-
tion, caused by tempo, part doubling, and technique.)20 With this use of ma-
racas being most characteristic of auxiliary percussion in rock, the music that
opens Four Organs seems to be a synecdoche of rock, a part standing for the
whole, and the maracas function mainly as a signifier of rock, much more
than as an ethnic or exotic signifier within rock. But even though the rock ref-
erence seems to be the primary one, when we keep in mind the prevalence of
constantly pulsing shaker parts in many sub-Saharan African musics, distinct
points of reference for this kind of maracas playing may be subsumed into
a broadly African/African-diasporic rhythmic practice that has had a wide-
ranging impact on music across the globe.21 That said, Michael Veal has also
argued that the maracas pulses may be interpreted as reminiscent of Native
American rattles in initiation rites like vision quests—suggesting a different
ethno-racial lineage for this musical element.22

Moment 2: Measure 1, 0:02–0:05

The four organs enter in the first proper measure of the composition. Three
dimensions of this measure stand out in some respect. The first, and following
Schonberg’s emphasis on sound, is the organ timbre—a loud (forte) and espe-
cially reedy, trebly sound emanating from four amplified Farfisa Mini Compact
combo organs that Reich had bought used in New York.23 Farfisa, an Italian
company, produced its electronic organs initially as electronic accordions, be-
fore changing their housing in 1964 to compete with other electronic combo
organ manufacturers (including Vox organs). The Vox Continental was a
better-known organ used by most of the major rock bands at the time, but the
Farfisa models were cheaper and therefore favored by garage bands.24 In its tran-
sistor accordion version it was used as early as Del Shannon’s “Ginny in the
Mirror” (1962), and in this case as well as later songs that use the instrument,
we hear it primarily in an upper line embellishing or doubling the melody, al-
though chordal passages are present as well.25 (For example, “Mirage” [1967]
by Tommy James and the Shondells presents only such an upper line, whereas
Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs’ “Wooly Bully” [1965] includes only chords.)
The low quality of the keyboards Reich initially used in performance is evident
in the 1970 Shandar recording of Four Organs, in which one can hear tuning
inconsistencies and extraneous keyboard sounds (such as volume swells after
the first few attacks, as at 0:05 and 0:08).26
24 Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns

The second aspect of the music is the pitch material that the organs col-
lectively play, which can be labeled as an E dominant-eleventh chord, since it
includes the pitch classes of all A major diatonic thirds above the bass E up
to the tonic (E–G♯–B–D–F♯–A), with every pitch except B3 doubled once or
twice; this is Reich’s preferred labeling (which I generally use later). Because
that labeling implies a voicing featuring stacked thirds and the actual chord is
voiced as a cluster chord, it may perhaps be better described as an E9sus4 with
an added third (see Ex. 1.1a–c).27 The voicing highlights the clash between G♯4
and A4, with the notes sometimes sounding simultaneously and at other times
oscillating, the A4 resolving down to G♯4 and then returning to the A4 disso-
nance. One could also simply describe it as a diatonic cluster chord—say, as
[24689E], hexachordal set-class 6-33 (023579), or even a three-sharp diatonic
(or Mixolydian) cluster—with an E or [4] in the bass (Ex. 1.1d). As the pro-
gression expands in duration, the music takes on the character of an extended
cadential resolution, making the piece amount to what Reich jokingly has called
“the longest V–I cadence in the history of Western music.”28 A variant of this
chord was found in the middle section of Reich’s now suppressed film sound-
track to Robert Nelson’s film Oh Dem Watermelons (1965), in which appears
a dominant-seventh chord (this one in D major) that includes the third and
fourth above the bass, closely spaced so as to produce a harsh minor-second
dissonance (see Ex. 1.1e, transposed to A major for comparison). Reich claims
that this chord was used frequently by Thelonious Monk and interprets it as
based on a conflict between tonic and dominant harmonies of a key (the elev-
enth or suspended fourth being the tonic of the key), and in this capacity, the
third, as a leading tone, adds a certain amount of dominant-ness.29 Indeed, as
Ian Quinn notes, Reich used the word “watermelon” to refer to exactly this type
of harmony in his sketchbooks prior to the composition of Four Organs.30 One
canonical example of such a chord in post-bop jazz can be found in the opening
of Wynton Kelly’s piano accompaniment in Miles Davis’s recording of “Someday

Example 1.1 Four Organs (1970), m. 1 chord comparisons: (a) as written, B3 the only
undoubled pitch; (b) as E dom11; (c) as E dom9-sus4-add3; (d) as [24689E] with [4]
in bass, set-class 6-33 (023579), or 3♯-diatonic/E without C♯; (e) Oh Dem Watermelons
(1965), watermelon-canon chord, transposed to A major; (f) Wynton Kelly’s chordal
opening in “Someday My Prince Will Come” (1961), transposed to start on E3; (g) E
dom9-sus4, “Maiden Voyage” chord, transposed from D.

(a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g)

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
l’auteur partis, que c’était insupportable de travailler dans ces
conditions-là.
Le soir de la générale, le premier acte, qui inspirait quelques
craintes, marcha admirablement. L’auteur, aux nombreux amis qui
vinrent sur le plateau, se bornait à dire : « Ceci n’est qu’un acte
d’exposition. Attendez mon deux. »
Après le deux, les admirateurs revinrent, mais en moins grand
nombre. Ils dirent à l’auteur que ça marchait très bien, mais :
Qu’on avait eu tort d’allumer le calorifère,
Que la robe de l’héroïne était trop mauve,
Qu’il y avait dans une baignoire une bande de gens ivres qu’on
aurait bien dû expulser.
L’auteur attendait d’autres constatations. Il vit venir à lui un
parent complaisant, qui affirma que c’était un triomphe. Il oublia
volontairement que ce cousin était un bénisseur invétéré.
D’ailleurs, il comptait beaucoup sur le trois, qui était très gai, très
en dehors.
Cet acte fut écouté par le public avec une satisfaction plutôt
intérieure. Ce calorifère abominable empêchait les grosses
manifestations. Après la chute du rideau, il y eut une récolte
suffisante d’applaudissements pour le nom de l’auteur. On ne le
demanda pas sur la scène, et il n’eut pas à faire triompher sa ferme
résolution de n’y venir à aucun prix.
Deux amis seulement apparurent sur le plateau. Le directeur
regardait l’auteur, ma foi ! très amicalement.
L’auteur lui dit : « Hé bien ! je crois qu’on peut s’embrasser. »
Le directeur avança sa grosse joue piquante.
L’auteur lui dit : « Enfin, tu es content ? »
Le directeur répondit : « Très content, mais tu as quelques amis
dans la salle, qui sont venus te complimenter et qui sont de fameux
salauds. »
— Qui ça ? qui ça ?
 Le directeur battit en retraite.
— Je ne sais pas leurs noms, mais je sais que ce sont des amis
à toi.
Le lendemain, à trois heures, l’auteur était au théâtre. La dame
de la location travaillait à un très joli ouvrage de broderie.
— Comment ça va-t-il, madame Bouvet ?
— Moi, je vais bien… Ma feuille de location, c’est tout doux.
— Vous n’êtes pas contente ?
— On ne peut rien dire avant le premier samedi.
A quatre heures, le premier samedi, on avait cinq mille francs. Le
directeur déclara que le soir on jouerait à bureaux fermés.
L’auteur vint de bonne heure pour jouir de ce spectacle. Mais il
constata que les arrivants trouvaient tout de même des places. La
recette se montait à 9.322 francs.
— C’est le plein ? demanda-t-il à l’administrateur.
— C’est le gros maximum… à peu de chose près.
— C’est le plein ? demanda-t-il un peu plus tard au secrétaire
général.
— Oui, c’est tout ce qu’on peut faire.
Une demi-heure après, il rencontra le contrôleur-chef. Il se fit
répéter le chiffre de la recette.
— C’est le plein ?
— Pas tout à fait. Nous pouvons faire onze mille.
… Quelle rage de poursuivre ainsi les enquêtes, et de ne pas se
contenter de la première affirmation !
La recette était belle, mais l’indication n’était pas entièrement
satisfaisante. En cas de succès, le directeur l’avait déclaré, on
atteignait toujours le maximum le premier samedi.
La matinée, le lendemain, fut médiocre. Mais allez donc lutter
contre Auteuil et ce match de rugby à Colombes !
 Le dimanche soir, ce fut assez maigre ; ce n’était pas un théâtre
populaire.
— Nous n’avons pas de location pour demain lundi, dit le
directeur, on louera dans la journée. C’est le genre du théâtre. Nous
ne ferons pas plus de 6.000.
On fit 2.400. Le directeur déclara que c’était très beau, étant
donné le temps désagréable. Il était tombé du grésil. D’autre part, à
la Bourse du commerce, il y avait un petit krach… Les gens se
réservaient.
Ils montrèrent la même réserve les jours suivants. On garnissait
les salles avec des faveurs, mais le théâtre était décidément un peu
grand. L’auteur souriait vaillamment. Quelques compensations lui
arrivaient, des louanges bien filtrées : la sœur d’une habilleuse avait
déclaré que c’était la plus jolie soirée qu’elle eût passée au théâtre
depuis trente ans…
Le samedi, la recette fut assez bonne… dans les neuf mille…
huit mille quatre cents exactement. Et, pourtant, un boxeur poids
moyen anglais de grande valeur rencontrait ce soir-là le champion
de France au Cirque de Paris… « Ils ont fait deux cent mille francs
de recette, dit le directeur. C’est de l’argent pris aux théâtres comme
avec la main. »
Le dimanche fut un petit peu supérieur au dimanche précédent.
L’auteur arriva le lundi après-midi dans le cabinet du directeur. Il le
trouva en conférence avec un autre auteur. La conversation s’arrêta
brusquement à son entrée. Tous deux lui serrèrent la main avec
effusion.
— Croyez-vous que sa pièce est exquise ? dit le directeur à
l’autre auteur. Quel talent il a cet animal-là ! Mais ce n’est pas tout à
fait la pièce d’ici…
Le confrère joignit sa voix louangeuse à celle du directeur. Puis la
conversation s’arrêta à nouveau. L’auteur du Désir d’Henriette prit
congé, et s’en alla vers des arbres, au bois de Boulogne. C’était la
première journée de printemps ; avec un léger effort et de la
littérature, il lui trouva un certain charme.
 Le spectateur de la “Générale”

Faut-il donner des répétitions générales ? Ne vaut-il pas mieux

entrer tout de suite en contact avec le grand public, sans passer au
préalable devant un aréopage un peu dur ?
Les jeunes auteurs sont et ont raison d’être partisans de ces
représentations préliminaires. C’est le public des générales qui fait
les gloires.
Mais c’est aussi lui qui les défait. Alors il vaut mieux pour les
vieux maîtres ne pas courir cette épreuve redoutable.
Moi qui écris ceci, je n’aurai d’avis sur ce sujet qu’après ma
prochaine générale. Comme j’aurai eu une grande confiance dans
mon nouvel ouvrage (dont je ne connais encore ni le thème ni le
titre), je n’aurai pas hésité à affronter des juges, tant il m’aura
semblé impossible qu’ils ne me donnent pas raison.
Si la générale est mauvaise, je dirai qu’ils sont odieux, et je
prendrai la résolution de ne plus donner de générales. Cette
résolution durera jusqu’au moment où j’aurai entrepris la pièce
d’après, certaine celle-là d’enlever tous les suffrages.
Si vous voulez bien, passons dans la salle et tâchons de
retrouver les sentiments qui nous ont agités, quand nous avons
assisté comme spectateurs à la générale d’autrui.
Le rideau se lève. A moins d’être pris tout de suite par une
sensationnelle entrée en action, le spectateur, aux premières
scènes, éprouve un sentiment d’ennui à se trouver en présence de
gens qu’il ne connaît pas. Ils racontent leurs histoires de famille et il
se fait l’effet d’être un intrus.
Puis, dès la première réplique qui l’accroche, il se dépêche de
prendre un parti, comme s’il avait le feu au derrière, et de se
déclarer à lui-même que c’est très bien. Si, par contre, la scène lui
déplaît, il désire que la pièce soit très mauvaise. Car il est là pour
s’amuser, c’est-à-dire pour rendre des jugements bien catégoriques
dans un sens ou dans un autre. Et s’il a décidé que la pièce ne vaut
rien, il verra venir avec irritation d’autres passages qui ont l’air d’être
bons et vont peut-être l’obliger à déranger et à bousculer son
opinion.
L’acte est terminé. On a applaudi, trop ou trop peu à son gré. Il
s’en va dans les couloirs.
S’il est jeune, il affirmera son opinion et supportera mal les
contradicteurs. S’il est vieux, il se montrera plus réservé, non par
manque de courage, mais parce qu’il n’est plus très sûr de son avis,
comme au temps de sa triomphante jeunesse. Et il ne se figure plus
désormais qu’il est investi d’une mission.
Mais voici deux juges qui discutent. L’un crie au chef-d’œuvre ;
l’autre déclare que c’est du chiqué médiocre. Ils ne rompent pas
d’une semelle, mais s’influencent réciproquement sans s’en douter.
Celui qui aimait la pièce aborde le second acte avec méfiance. Le
détracteur, au contraire, se sent envahi par une bienveillance
involontaire. Au deuxième entr’acte, ils se retrouvent en
contradiction. Mais ils ont changé de camp. Ce n’est pas grave : au
bar, ils finissent par transiger sur le dos de l’auteur.
A la fin de la pièce, ils se rencontrent encore, s’aident
mutuellement à mettre leur pardessus. L’un résume son impression
en un : oui, oui… indulgent qui ne veut pas dire grand’chose ; l’autre
en un : oui, oui… méprisant qui n’a pas une bien nette signification.
Leur verdict, en fin de compte, est neutre, et le pauvre auteur n’aura
même pas de juges à maudire.
 Conseils aux jeunes auteurs

Il ne s’agit de rééditer ici ni Aristote, ni Lessing, mais d’offrir aux

débutants quelques moyens pratiques pour se pousser dans la
carrière.
Aujourd’hui, nous aborderons deux points également importants :
le choix d’un pseudonyme, le choix d’un titre.
Il y a des années, à l’époque où nous traitions ces mêmes sujets
dans la Revue Blanche, nous avons donné à nos confrères un
conseil que nous jugions et nous jugeons encore excellent.
Choisir de préférence comme pseudonyme le nom d’une rue très
passante. S’appeler, par exemple, Henri Poissonnière ou Gaston de
Bonne-Nouvelle. Aussitôt que l’auteur aura acquis une certaine
notoriété, la foule s’imaginera vaguement qu’il a reçu du Conseil
municipal cet éclatant hommage : l’attribution de son nom à une des
voies parisiennes les plus en vue.
Supposons que M. Henri Poissonnière ait franchi la première et
la plus dure étape, et qu’il ait fait recevoir une pièce dans un théâtre
(nous verrons dans une prochaine causerie les procédés à employer
pour y parvenir). Il s’agit d’attirer l’attention sur l’ouvrage. Voici un
système qui nous a donné souvent d’assez bons résultats :
Vous feuilletez la collection d’un grand quotidien. Aux abords de
juin ou de juillet, vous y lisez le résultat d’une enquête : les auteurs,
sollicités par les courriéristes, exposent leurs projets pour la saison
qui vient, et donnent les titres de leurs pièces futures.
Vous choisissez un de ces titres, vous le donnez à votre pièce, et
vous faites passer une note aux journaux.
Vous vous attirez dans les deux jours qui suivent une lettre de
protestation. On réclame la priorité du titre.
Vous vous inclinez. Vous envoyez à l’auteur une lettre pleine de
déférence admirative, et vous donnez publiquement à votre pièce un
des titres retenus par un autre auteur.
Il faut s’arrêter au bout de trois fois. Les auteurs, c’est entendu,
ne manqueront jamais de bonne volonté pour protester. Tout de
même, à la longue, le procédé risquerait d’être mis à jour.

Mais le plus difficile n’est pas d’« allumer » le public sur une
pièce ; il est autrement plus malaisé d’y intéresser un directeur.
Devant ce souverain juge, quelle est la situation la plus
favorable ? Etre un peu connu ou tout à fait ignoré ?
La plupart des directeurs aiment bien le véritable auteur inconnu.
Car, même lorsqu’ils ne sont pas des directrices, ils ont l’âme très
féminine. Ils aiment mieux supposer et imaginer que connaître. Ils
préfèrent l’espoir confus et illimité à la réalité trop strictement
évaluée et définie.
C’est pour cette raison qu’une pièce non encore écrite les
intéresse beaucoup plus qu’un manuscrit achevé. Nous avons
maintes fois recommandé aux jeunes auteurs, s’ils arrivent à obtenir
une entrevue, de ne jamais apporter au directeur le manuscrit de
leur pièce. Il vaut mieux raconter le sujet avec entrain et ne remettre
le manuscrit que beaucoup plus tard, au moment où le directeur,
pressé par les circonstances, n’a plus le temps matériel de refuser
votre ouvrage.
Mais partez bien de cette idée qu’il est extrêmement dangereux
de laisser un directeur en tête-à-tête avec un manuscrit.
 Même s’il ne le lit pas, c’est très grave.
La seule présence sur son bureau d’un gros cahier à couverture
orange ou bleue suffit à le dégoûter de la pièce et de l’auteur.

Faites toujours dactylographier votre œuvre en plusieurs copies,

de façon à pouvoir remettre à chaque directeur nouveau un
manuscrit tout frais. Il ne faut pas que l’ouvrage semble avoir été
profané par d’autres regards.
Je ne vous proposerai pas du tout en exemple ce jeune confrère
qui parsema son manuscrit d’annotations au crayon anonyme :
excellent, saisissant, gros effet certain. Même si le directeur eût pu
être dupe de cette roublardise un peu grosse, c’était d’une mauvaise
psychologie. Car un directeur est l’être le plus jaloux du monde. S’il
lui plaît d’aimer une pièce, il veut être le premier à l’aimer.

Il n’est pas mauvais, pour avoir plus facilement ses entrées

auprès des directeurs, de se faire « une situation dans le
journalisme ».
Mais comment y arriver ?
Voici l’histoire instructive de notre confrère Joseph Lembaumé.
Il était professeur de première dans un petit collège de province.
Passionné des « choses de théâtre », il ne trouvait, dans la ville de
H…, personne avec qui s’entretenir agréablement de ses
préoccupations favorites.
Pour se distraire, Joseph Lembaumé proposait à ses élèves des
dissertations françaises sur les sujets qui lui tenaient à cœur.
« Que pensez-vous de cette loi d’Aristote, etc. ? »
« Comment interpréter cette remarque de Diderot ?… »
Les réponses malheureusement manquaient d’intérêt… La
génération de cette année de première, dans cette petite sous-
préfecture, n’avait rien donné d’éblouissant.
 Aussi, après six mois d’ennui, Joseph Lembaumé se décida-t-il à
gagner Paris, où un de ses parents occupait un emploi
d’administrateur dans un grand quotidien.
Aujourd’hui, Joseph Lembaumé s’est fait une place en vue. Sa
culture ne le dessert pas pour le métier de journaliste. Elle
l’empêche en tout cas de faire parade, à tout bout de phrase, de ses
connaissances grammaticales, et lui permet d’éviter les imparfaits du
subjonctif que les primaires parvenus étalent avec tant d’ostentation.
D’ailleurs, son travail de rédaction est extrêmement réduit.
Chaque quinzaine, il fait faire une composition de français aux plus
notoires de nos auteurs, directeurs et acteurs.
« Quelle sera l’influence du ciné sur le théâtre ? Vous paraît-elle
salutaire ou néfaste ? Justifiez votre opinion. »
« Que pensez-vous du théâtre social ? »
« Que pensez-vous de l’alternance des spectacles ? »
Son questionnaire envoyé, Joseph Lembaumé se rend au cercle
et, pendant que ses vénérables élèves rédigent leurs copies, ou les
font rédiger par des secrétaires, le professeur se livre à
d’émouvantes parties de bridge.
Le signataire de ces lignes — il l’avoue avec un certain orgueil —
fut admis plusieurs fois à « composer ». Il lui arrive de décliner
tacitement cet honneur, et de s’abstenir d’envoyer sa contribution à
ces enquêtes.
Il y a une douzaine d’années, je reçus un petit bleu urgent. Il
émanait d’un de mes confrères attaché à un grand magazine. On me
demandait mon avis sur « l’Au-Delà », rien de plus. On ajoutait que
le périodique était sous presse et que l’on attendait ma réponse
dans les vingt-quatre heures.
Je répondis par un autre pneu, en m’excusant de n’avoir aucune
opinion toute prête sur l’Au-Delà. Je m’étais, alléguai-je, spécialisé
dans « l’en deçà », qui suffisait largement à absorber mon activité
intellectuelle.
 C’était une réponse. Elle ne fut pas publiée, non plus d’ailleurs
que l’enquête, qui n’avait probablement pas rendu ce que l’on avait
espéré.
Deux ans après, nouveau petit bleu du même confrère. Il me
posait cette question plutôt indiscrète :
« Quel a été le souvenir le plus désagréable de votre vie ? »
Je répondis, faisant les frais d’un nouveau pneu :
« C’est, il y a deux ans, après avoir été sommé par vous de
répondre à une enquête, d’avoir constaté que cette enquête n’avait
jamais été publiée. »
Depuis cette dernière réponse, le magazine en question me
considère comme un élève indiscipliné et me dispense de toute
composition. Dans un sens, c’est plutôt agréable pour un étudiant
qui n’est plus de la première jeunesse, et qui demande à travailler,
pendant quelques années encore, sur des sujets de son choix.

Vaut-il mieux connaître personnellement les critiques ?

Oui, certainement.
Un critique que vous connaissez pourra, c’est entendu, vous faire
un mauvais article. Mais il l’aurait peut-être fait tel s’il ne vous eût
pas connu.
Quand on vous présente à un critique, faut-il être discret et
réservé dans les compliments qu’on lui fait ? Mais non, jeune
homme ! Allez-y carrément, et pas avec le dos de la cuiller.
Émile Berr a fait cette juste remarque que les gens qui
s’offensent de recevoir un pourboire sont beaucoup moins nombreux
que nous nous plaisons à l’imaginer.
Les louanges les plus outrées, la plupart des critiques les
acceptent à guichet ouvert.
On vous racontera l’histoire du critique légendaire qui, par amour
du paradoxe, écrit un article enthousiaste sur un auteur qu’il ne
connaît pas. Mais qui vous dit que ce sera sur vous que tombera
cette aubaine hasardeuse ?
Seconde étape. Les articles ont paru. Faut-il remercier les
critiques ? Mais oui, jeune homme, mais oui. Je connais un auteur
dont c’était aussi l’avis, mais qui n’arrivait pas à écrire toutes ses
actions de grâces, parce qu’il voulait envoyer à chacun un
remerciement spécial, approprié, sur mesure !… Quels soins
superflus ! De la louange de confection, en choisissant la plus
grande taille. Quelque chose de ce goût : « Aucun éloge ne pouvait
autant m’émouvoir et m’enorgueillir. »
C’est un peu servile ? N’ayez pas peur. Avec la crise actuelle du
change, le verbe s’est fait de moins en moins cher, et l’épithète est
tombée au taux de la couronne.
Pour les mauvais articles, laissez-nous vous soumettre, sans
vous la préconiser, une réponse que nous avons écrite, et que nous
avons, en fin de compte, jugé inutile d’envoyer à un critique assez
jeune encore, de talent, ma foi ! mais un peu serin, et dont l’air
d’autorité nous avait paru exagérément précoce.

« Mon cher ami,

« Je voudrais bien être aussi sûr que ma pièce est bonne

que vous êtes certain qu’elle est mauvaise. »

(Si le destinataire se reconnaît au signalement ci-dessus, il

n’aura qu’à réclamer la lettre à l’Éditeur.)

Voici une petite histoire probablement vraie que nous soumettons

aux méditations des jeunes auteurs et dont ils pourront tirer profit.
Un dramaturge débutant avait obtenu une lecture d’un directeur.
Il faut dire qu’il était le neveu d’un gros marchand de grains, lequel
avait mis des fonds dans le théâtre, ce qui avait créé, entre le
directeur et lui, une de ces amitiés solides qui survivent parfois à
l’épuisement de la commandite.
 Il vaut mieux lire une pièce que de la donner à lire. Le directeur
n’écoute pas constamment. Mais, tout de même, il connaît mieux
votre ouvrage que s’il laissait le manuscrit ficelé à son chevet.
Ce directeur, après la lecture, demanda au jeune auteur qui « il
voyait » dans le rôle de l’héroïne. L’auteur prononça avec assurance
le nom d’une actrice assez en vue.
— Ça ne serait pas mal, dit le directeur. Ce n’est pas tout à fait
son affaire, mais le nom est bon pour l’affiche. Et puis, c’est une
bonne camarade à moi, pour qui j’ai beaucoup d’affection. Il faudrait
aller lui lire votre pièce…
Un auteur ne refuse jamais de lire sa pièce. Il se déplacera
jusqu’aux extrémités de la périphérie, de la banlieue ou même de la
province pour aller provoquer de l’admiration chez la femme du
directeur ou chez l’amant de la prima donna.
— Le rôle ne peut pas lui déplaire, dit-il timidement.
— Non, non, je ne crois pas. Mais il ne faut pas lui lire la pièce
telle que vous me l’avez montrée…
— … Pourquoi ?
— Attendez… Vous allez d’abord commander un autre manuscrit
où vous écourterez considérablement le deuxième rôle de femme…
— Y pensez-vous ? Ma pièce en sera démolie…
— Ne vous en faites pas. Ce n’est que provisoire…
… Il ne s’en fit pas. Il lut la pièce à la jeune comédienne qui
accepta d’enthousiasme le rôle principal. On signa l’engagement et,
aux répétitions, le second rôle de femme reprit sa première
importance à l’aide des phrases un instant supprimées, et rétablies
peu à peu sous forme de petits béquets sournois.

Inviterez-vous vos amis à vos répétitions générales ?

C’est selon…
Votre ambition se borne-t-elle à obtenir un succès de hasard,
créé par les bonnes dispositions fortuites de la foule ?
 Si vos prétentions sont aussi modestes, ne convoquez pas vos
amis. Vous n’êtes pas digne d’eux.
Ce n’est pas le rôle d’un ami de favoriser, par une lâche
complaisance, un succès qu’il juge immérité.
Il est bien pénétré de la grandeur de sa tâche, et il suffit qu’il soit
invité à votre générale pour se sentir tout à coup une conscience de
bronze. Il devient une sorte de vestale de l’Art.
Évidemment, sa fonction d’ami véritable et sévère ne va pas
jusqu’à l’obliger à se mettre ouvertement en travers du succès.
Il ne découragera pas positivement les spectateurs
enthousiastes.
Quand on le prendra à partie : « Croyez-vous que c’est bien ? » il
répondra avec modération : « Mais oui… mais oui… Vous pensez
que ce n’est pas moi qui dirai le contraire… »
« Ça fera deux cents représentations ! » dira l’un.
« Dieu vous entende ! » répondra-t-il, laissant percer son
angoisse fraternelle.
« C’est une œuvre bien intéressante ! » s’exclamera un autre.
« Oui, dira-t-il, c’est un effort ! »
« Vous ne trouvez pas que c’est sa meilleure pièce ? »
« Il a tout de même fait mieux », corrigera-t-il avec une grande
douceur.
Et il citera un autre ouvrage de vous, inconnu à peu près et
inoffensif.
Il n’est pas seulement le conservateur de la Vérité et de l’Art.
C’est lui qui a la garde jalouse de votre personnalité, et qui
l’empêche de sortir des limites qu’il lui a, une fois pour toutes,
assignées. Comme on fait la part du feu, il a fait celle de votre talent.
Il sait mieux que vous ce que vous êtes, et ce que vous valez. Il
veut pour vous des réussites de son choix, et qui soient dans votre
ligne. Il est un tuteur sévère, qui a charge d’âme. Si vous vouliez
être traité avec une lâche indulgence, ce n’est pas lui qu’il fallait
inviter…
 “Le Gendre” [2]

Tragédie-sketch en un acte et un épilogue

A Pierre Veber.

[2] L’Assemblée des Auteurs à laquelle il est fait

allusion, se proposait de rétablir l’ancien article 17 de
leurs statuts. Entre autres interdictions, cet article
défendait aux directeurs de jouer sur leurs théâtres des
pièces signées de leur nom, du nom de leur fils ou du
nom de leurs parents.

PERSONNAGES :
ELLE, fille du directeur ;
LUI, mari d’Elle ;
L’HOMME DE PAILLE.

SCÈNE PREMIÈRE
Lui, Elle

Lui

Madame, c’en est fait. Déjà l’on délibère…

Elle
Pourquoi c’en est-il fait ?

Lui

Que veut-on que j’espère ?

Cent ou deux cents auteurs là-bas sont réunis…
Mes beaux jours glorieux, je le crains, sont finis !

Elle

De grâce, expliquez-moi ces choses que j’ignore…

Lui

Le jour où votre père — Ah ! je le vois encore ! —

Mit solennellement votre main dans ma main,
Ce fut pour moi, madame, un bonheur surhumain !
Car si l’amant voyait sa flamme couronnée,
L’auteur voyait aussi grandir sa destinée ;
Le directeur puissant qui comblait mon amour,
Une fois par saison nous assurait un tour.

Elle

Et quel événement vient causer vos alarmes ?

Lui

Écoutez ces clameurs, entendez ces bruits d’armes :

Contre le fier Quinson un complot s’est ourdi.
Le choc est annoncé pour cet après-midi.
Armont, venu d’Athène en passant par Phocée,
Dit qu’entre les auteurs la justice est faussée ;
Timmory l’accompagne et, réclamant des lois,
Decourcelle a dressé son beau profil gaulois.
Leurs efforts combinés, hélas ! font que je tremble…
Cet orage qu’ils vont déchaîner tous ensemble,
De Gustave en ce jour menace la maison…
Je pourrais là-dessus me faire une raison…
Mais ces faiseurs de lois, pour que Gustave tombe,
Ont besoin, croyez-moi, d’élargir l’hécatombe.
Un décret contre un seul ne peut être voté.
Et votre époux sera, madame, exécuté !

Elle

Pour triompher, ami, n’as-tu pas d’autres scènes ?

Lui

Ce sera le retour des heures incertaines,

De l’attente anxieuse où sombre notre espoir…
Directeurs étrangers, devrai-je vous revoir ?
Ne connaîtrai-je plus ces façons familières
D’un patron paternel qui se dit, aux premières,
En couvrant de baisers son gendre triomphant,
Que le douze pour cent retourne à son enfant !

Elle

A ce malheur, hélas ! n’est-il point de remède ?

Je ne puis cependant, pour te venir en aide,
M’en aller dès ce soir seule sur le chemin
Et, me jetant aux pieds du Pontife romain,
Obtenir que son bras tout-puissant nous sépare…

Lui

N’augmente pas ainsi mes douleurs, ô barbare !

Tu sais que rien n’atteint mon amour et ma foi,
Jusqu’au dernier soupir je serai sous ta loi.
Pourtant votre propos, tendre épouse que j’aime,
Suscite en mon esprit un rare stratagème…
Divorçons !
 Elle

Que dis-tu ?

Lui

Qu’un divorce légal

Déchire aux yeux de tous ce lien conjugal…
Nous semblons nous quitter, mais, sitôt la sentence,
Nous reprendrons tous deux la commune existence
Et saurons retrouver, faussement désunis,
Le doux et libre amour des oiseaux dans leurs nids…
Que le seigneur de Flers croie à notre rupture,
Et ses cruels statuts, dont se rit la Nature,
Grâce à ce dol charmant resteront satisfaits !

Elle

Je t’ai laissé parler, perfide ! Tu pensais

Que j’allais consentir à l’artifice infâme
Dont tu n’aurais usé que pour leurrer ta femme…
Quand elle aurait donné, de son cœur ingénu,
Le faux consentement, tu l’aurais retenu
Et pris ce bon moyen de te séparer d’elle !

Lui, douloureusement

Ah ! peut-on méconnaître un cœur vraiment fidèle !

Elle

Mais pourquoi m’obstiner ? Pourquoi vous retenir ?

Divorcez, si tel est votre secret désir !

(Elle s’apprête à sortir.)

Lui
 Ah ! de grâce, écoutez !

Elle

Que faut-il que j’écoute ?

Lui, suppliant

Restez !

Elle

Auteur ingrat, poursuivez votre route !

(Elle sort.)

Lui

Blessé jusques au fond du cœur,

De l’article dix-sept innocente victime,
Me faut-il aujourd’hui quitter ma légitime,
Ou laisser ce théâtre où je règne en vainqueur ?
Je demeure immobile, et mon âme accablée
Maudit cette assemblée…

Des deux côtés m’apparaît ta rigueur,

O destinée amère !
En demeurant, je perds le directeur ;
En divorçant, je renonce au beau-père !

(Assommé par sa douleur et d’un cœur trop sensible au mal de mer

pour supporter pendant plus d’une strophe le balancement d’un
débat cornélien, il tombe évanoui sur le sol. Musique. Apparition
de l’Homme de paille, dont le corps est fait de bottes de paille
réunies).
 L’Homme de paille,
qui, étant de création relativement récente, s’exprime dans un style
plus moderne.

C’est moi qui suis l’homme de paille,

Un être fragile et costaud…
Quand la loi me livre bataille,
J’esquive son glaive pataud.
Je penche sous les coups de taille,
Mais résiste, vaille que vaille,
Et l’estoc a beau traverser
Ma poitrine et mes flancs de paille,
Il ne pourra pas me blesser…

(Fanfare.)

Étant fait de fétus de paille,

Je pèse moins qu’un poids bantam,
Et puis passer, sans aucun dam,
Dessus le code et sa broussaille :
C’est moi qui suis l’Homme de paille !

Lui,
qui renonce, vu l’urgence, à s’expliquer en vers.

Homme de paille, j’aurai recours à toi !

L’Homme de paille

C’est inutile pour le moment… J’arrive de la Société des

auteurs…

Lui

Tu es sociétaire ?