Steve Reich, falando sobre influências. O maestro fez 75 anos no último dia 10 de agosto:
I would say that later on, very important influences came by discovering African music on recording and having no idea how it was put together, but kind of wanting to find out. As a graduate student with Luciano Berio, we went down to the Ojai Festival - the festival that Stravinsky started north of Los Angeles. I guess that was 1962, maybe ’63. The people who were holding forth included Gunther Schuller, who was just finishing up his book on the history of early jazz. And when Schuller was speaking to us -he was a graduate student - he said he’d discovered a book that contained the first accurate scores of West African music and transcription. And I said, “Excuse me, Mr. Schuller. What’s the book?” He said, “’Studies in African Music’ by A.M. Jones.”
And I went back up to Northern California, where I was living at the time, and got the two-volume set: one volume of just scores, another volume of analysis of those scores, and some interesting sociology as well. And it’s still on my bookshelf, I mean, I returned the book to the library and bought a copy, which was very expensive. And - at about the same time that was going on - I was listening to John Coltrane when he was playing “My Favorite Things” and on what became “modal jazz,” but what you could describe, very simply, as “playing a lot of notes to very few harmonies.” An [album] like “Africa/Brass,” [with two sessions], which really impressed me, was basically a half-an-hour in F. Jazz musicians say, “Hey man, what’s the changes?” “F.” “No! F for half-an-hour!”
That was very instructive. And, at the same time, I was studying with Luciano Berio and writing 12-tone music. The way I wrote 12-tone music was like, “Don’t transpose the row. Don’t retrograde the row. Don’t invert the row. Just repeat the row over and over, and you can try to sneak in some harmony.” And Berio said, “If you want to write tonal music, why don’t you write tonal music?” And I said, “That’s what I’m trying to do.” So I would say, “If you put all that into a jug and shake it, out I come.”
It was a very, very difficult period because, basically, the people that I was going to graduate school with were either very interested in European Serial Music or in John Cage--or in both. And, honestly, I was involved in neither. I could respect the purity of spirit in John Cage’s work, and I could certainly appreciate the mastery in Berio and Stockhausen, but my heart wasn’t in the game. I became a composer because I loved Bach, because I loved Stravinsky, because I loved jazz. And this was answering none of those. There was no fixed pulse, there was nothing you could tap your foot to, there was nothing you could whistle to, there was no key to hang on to; it was the very antithesis of that. So people who didn’t write that way at that time were simply a joke; you just weren’t taken seriously.(...)
Entrevista maravilhosa, na íntegra aqui.
por Leandro Oliveira
I would say that later on, very important influences came by discovering African music on recording and having no idea how it was put together, but kind of wanting to find out. As a graduate student with Luciano Berio, we went down to the Ojai Festival - the festival that Stravinsky started north of Los Angeles. I guess that was 1962, maybe ’63. The people who were holding forth included Gunther Schuller, who was just finishing up his book on the history of early jazz. And when Schuller was speaking to us -he was a graduate student - he said he’d discovered a book that contained the first accurate scores of West African music and transcription. And I said, “Excuse me, Mr. Schuller. What’s the book?” He said, “’Studies in African Music’ by A.M. Jones.”
And I went back up to Northern California, where I was living at the time, and got the two-volume set: one volume of just scores, another volume of analysis of those scores, and some interesting sociology as well. And it’s still on my bookshelf, I mean, I returned the book to the library and bought a copy, which was very expensive. And - at about the same time that was going on - I was listening to John Coltrane when he was playing “My Favorite Things” and on what became “modal jazz,” but what you could describe, very simply, as “playing a lot of notes to very few harmonies.” An [album] like “Africa/Brass,” [with two sessions], which really impressed me, was basically a half-an-hour in F. Jazz musicians say, “Hey man, what’s the changes?” “F.” “No! F for half-an-hour!”
That was very instructive. And, at the same time, I was studying with Luciano Berio and writing 12-tone music. The way I wrote 12-tone music was like, “Don’t transpose the row. Don’t retrograde the row. Don’t invert the row. Just repeat the row over and over, and you can try to sneak in some harmony.” And Berio said, “If you want to write tonal music, why don’t you write tonal music?” And I said, “That’s what I’m trying to do.” So I would say, “If you put all that into a jug and shake it, out I come.”
It was a very, very difficult period because, basically, the people that I was going to graduate school with were either very interested in European Serial Music or in John Cage--or in both. And, honestly, I was involved in neither. I could respect the purity of spirit in John Cage’s work, and I could certainly appreciate the mastery in Berio and Stockhausen, but my heart wasn’t in the game. I became a composer because I loved Bach, because I loved Stravinsky, because I loved jazz. And this was answering none of those. There was no fixed pulse, there was nothing you could tap your foot to, there was nothing you could whistle to, there was no key to hang on to; it was the very antithesis of that. So people who didn’t write that way at that time were simply a joke; you just weren’t taken seriously.(...)
Entrevista maravilhosa, na íntegra aqui.
por Leandro Oliveira
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