QAS welcomes leading experts for Steve Reich Symposium

Steve Reich Symposium - Report from Mr Richards, Senior Deputy Head - Academic

Two leading academics – Pwyll ap Siôn and Ryan Ebright gave outstanding presentations on the music of Steve Reich: a leading American composer who happens to be celebrating his 86^th birthday today! The symposium was aimed at our music scholars – U4-U6. The students displayed academic tenacity and great levels of concentration: this symposium was pitched at an undergraduate level. The afternoon has presented the students with some great academic outcomes which the music department will build into their scholarship, stretch, and challenge programmes.

(Abstracts and biographies, outlined below).

Steve Reich in Context

Pwyll ap

Today, Steve Reich (b. 1936) is regarded by many as America’s greatest living composer. During the past fifty years, this important composer has evolved a distinctive and identifiable style and range of innovative techniques that can legitimately be said to have altered the course of musical history. Reich has also influenced and inspired musicians ranging from Brian Eno and Stephen Sondheim to pop icon David Bowie and Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood.

Although not a film composer, Reich’s music has appeared in several soundtracks, including A Home at the End of the World (Michael Meyer, 2004) and The Hunger Games (Gary Ross, 2012), while directors and video artists such as Bill Morrison and Beatriz Caravaggio have harnessed the rhythmic pulse and energy of Reich’s music to visual ends by setting works such as Different Trains (1988) to archival footage. Several of his compositions were subject to sampling, looping, remixing and rearranging by American, British and Japanese DJ artists such as Coldcut and DJ Spooky on the 1999 album Reich Remixed.

My presentation will aim to place Reich’s music in context by drawing on photographs, images, key texts (such as the essay ‘Music as a Gradual Process’), and key works. Although the presentation will divide Reich's output into a series of ‘phases’ (a term coined by the composer to describe one of his most innovative techniques), points of contact and patterns of continuity will also be emphasized in order to reveal connections between early Reich tape pieces It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out (!965 and 1966 respectively) to more recent works, such as Pulse (2015), Runner (2016), and Reich/Richter (2019).

Steve Reich’s The Cave, Testimonial Theater,  and the Documentary Turn in Contemporary Opera

Ryan Ebright

Since the 1980s, composers have relied increasingly on documentary sources in fashioning both staged and non-staged works, such as John Adams’s On the Transmigrations of Souls, Donnacha Dennehy’s The Hunger, Julia Wolfe’s Fire in My Mouth, and Steve Reich’s Different Trains, City Life, and WTC 9/11. This incorporation of documentary material poses thorny questions about musical objectivity, subjectivity, authenticity, and even truth. With Reich’s work on his operas The Cave and Three Tales, the question of documentary use is particularly complex, given that the melodies and harmonies in these works draw directly from first-person testimonial “documents” (in this case, recorded speech samples), within a genre better known for a preponderance of subjectivity through voice, music, and mimetic drama. Reich’s fascination with documentary material stretches back to his earliest work, and in this presentation, I demonstrate how The Cave (1993) can be situated within the shift toward a “theater of testimony”—derived from oral histories and interviews—that had begun to define American documentary theater in the late twentieth century. Yet the decision to center The Cave on these documents creates an aesthetic problem, one which I explore here: within a multimedia theatrical environment designed to showcase these documents, what is the role of singers, who for many constitute the sine non qua of opera?

Speakers

Pwyll ap Sion

Professor of Music: Bangor University

Pwyll ap Siôn is a musicologist and composer. He read music at Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating in 1990. He studied composition at Bangor University with John Pickard, and also with Martin Butler, receiving his PhD in 1998. He has been a member of staff at the School of Music since 1993. His research and teaching interests include minimalist and postminimalist music, Michael Nyman, Steve Reich, tonality in the twenty-first century and reference and quotation in contemporary music. In 2014–15 he received a Research Grant by the British Academy to undertake work on the impact of American Minimalism in Europe during the 1970s and in 2016–17 was awarded a Leverhulme/British Academy Research Fellowship to carry out research on the music of Steve Reich. His volume on the composer, Rethinking Reich, co-edited with Sumanth Gopinath, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2019. Forthcoming publications include chapters in Howard Skempton Conversations and Reflections on Music, edited by Esther Cavett and Matthew Head (Boydell Press, 2019) and Einstein on the Beach: Opera beyond Drama, edited by Jelena Novak and John Richardson, as part of Routledge’s Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera. In 2007, he co-organized the First International Conference on Minimalist Music and helped establish the Society for Minimalist Music. His monograph on The Music of Michael Nyman (Ashgate, 2007) was described in Music and Letters as a ‘groundbreaking study . . . it represents a substantial contribution to musicology’. Two edited volumes were published in 2013: Michael Nyman: Collected Writings and The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, the latter co-edited with Keith Potter and Kyle Gann (both Ashgate). He has published articles and reviews in The Soundtrack, Twentieth-Century Music and Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, produces regular reviews for Gramophone music magazine and contributes articles for The Strad. He has been invited to talk about minimalist music on Radio 3 and Radio 4 and given public lectures on the music of Philip Glass and Louis Andriessen at the Barbican Centre, London. He has served as external examiner on undergraduate and masters' programmes at Canterbury Christ Church, Cardiff, Middlesex, Trinity St. Davids and Wolverhampton Universities (and is currently external examiner at Aberdeen University), and has examined doctoral work at Aberdeen, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Goldsmiths, Middlesex, Newcastle, Perth and Southampton. He also served as jury member for the BBVA Foundation's prestigious Frontiers of Knowledge awards in Contemporary Music in 2017 and 2018, with the recipients of the award being Sofia Gubaidulina and Kaija Saariaho respectively. Pwyll ap Siôn has also published in the area of Welsh popular and Celtic music. His Cydymaith i Gerddoriaeth Cymru (Companion to Welsh Music), co-edited with Wyn Thomas, was published in 2018, receiving funding from the Welsh Federal College (Y Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol).

Ryan Ebright

Associate Professor, Musicology: Bowling Green State University. Ohio

Ryan Ebright completed his Ph.D. in musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and holds a M.M. in musicology and vocal performance from the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University. His research centers on opera, song, and intersections of music and drama, with an emphasis on 20th-century and contemporary opera, minimalism, and 19th-century Lieder. His current book project, Making American Opera after Einstein, examines the efforts of artists and institutions over the last forty years to redefine what American opera is and how audiences experience it.

Dr. Ebright presents regularly at regional, national, and international conferences. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and NewMusicBox, the journals American Music and Cambridge Opera Journal, and the book Rethinking Reich. Before coming to BGSU, Dr. Ebright taught at UNC-Chapel Hill and UNC Greensboro.