Nine Songs: Steve Reich

STEVE REICH: So I wanted to hear more of Stravinsky, and then the same friend who played me The Rite of Spring said, ‘I want you to hear something else’ and said, ‘I have this Brandenburg Concerto No. 5!’, and I put it on and again I said, this is incredible! I've never heard anything like this!

I'd never heard really any music before 1750, just a little bit of Mozart, a little bit of Haydn and I began to realise this. This has lucidity, you know? It's not orchestral, it's a rather large chamber ensemble, there is clarity. You can hear all the details, the rhythmic energy.

It made a huge impression, in a very different way than The Rite of Spring. But what it began to suggest to me, and what became increasingly clear over the years, was that my love of “classical music” really begins with Gregorian chant and runs up through Bach. And then I'm not as involved from 1750 to, let's say, Debussy… and then I become very, very involved with the music, you know: Debussy, Ravel, and ancient Stravinsky, and onwards through my generation and beyond.

One of the marks of especially romantic music is that it loses the steady pulse, the ictus, the regular beat. In the same period of time I also heard Bebop with Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. Stravinsky, Bach and Bebop: and that really, in a sense, delineated the direction of my life, starting in 1950 onwards.

I had taken piano lessons when I was about 7, 8, 9, and I played these simplified, watered-down versions of classical and I wasn't very drawn to it, so I just stopped. And at the age of 14, I heard the Stravinsky, the Bach, the Bebop and my friend and I were listening together and we said: ‘we’ve got to start a band’. And he said, ‘I'll be the pianist,’ and I said, ‘I'm going to be the drummer.’

I started studying with Roland Kohloff who – eventually became the timpanist with the New York Philharmonic – but in those days was a good drummer, and I started studying basic snare drum techniques with him.

And so that period – at the age of 14, in 1950 – was really a pivotal beginning, which really set me on the path that I basically stayed broadly on for the rest of my life.

ÓLAFUR ARNALDS: This feels like a common pattern. I also studied piano when I was around 6, 7, 8 and started playing these simplified versions of classical pieces, and very quickly, I just got very bored of it and lost all interest. But again, at the age of 14 and 15, I'm discovering… well it was punk music at that time, and that ironically brings me back to the piano, because I want to do some of that on a piano!