steve reich - biography


8. The Cave - City Life - Proverb

Drawing inspiration from the Cave of Machpelah in the city of Hebron (alleged burial place of many important Koranic/Old Testament figures), Korot and Reich decided to tell the story of these characters in an operatic form in which the characters never actually appear: the vocalizations consist of wordless singers and samples of recorded interviews with people of varied backgrounds discussing the characters. "In The Cave, the Biblical characters are never presented," Reich explained. "They live only indirectly, when the interviewees refer to them."

As in The Desert Music, the vocal samples again were the springboard for the musical notation, but the scale of this project (and the wide variety of voices and samples) proved daunting for Reich. Korot chose the interviewees to be included, providing Reich with the audio recordings of the video interviews they had shot together. Reich would then transcribe the phrases he found most musical into notation and sequenced them in order to tell the story. From this, Korot would edit the video presentation. The result is a richly woven fabric of sound and image, a bit imposing to take in all at once, but ultimately rewarding.

City Life (1995) divorces video from Reich's work, but retains many of the elements of drama and storytelling apparent in The Cave. Based on field recordings made of Reich's home town of New York, City Life includes the vocalisings of a street preacher (echoes of Come Out), car door slams, car alarms, and other sounds of the city. Its centerpiece is similar to that of Different Trains' (which included air raid sirens and discussions of Nazi death camps), employing recordings of rescue teams rushing to save lives during the bombing of the World Trade Center on February 23, 1993. The vocal samples are here played live on a synthesizer rather than on tape.

Reich also completed some chamber works during this period, including Nagoya Marimbas (1994) and Proverb (1995), a choral exploration of canon using a single line of Wittgenstein: "How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!"