can someone with a nytimes select scrip send me this article?

March 30, 2007, 10:13 pm
Steve Reich Talking Music: Technology and Influence

By The Score
The Steve Reich Ensemble, in a 2006 dress rehearsal of “The Cave” by Mr. Reich and Beryl Korot at John Jay College in New York. The piece uses both video and live performance. (Photo: Richard Termine for The New York Times)

In this final audio installment of Steve Reich’s interview for The Score, the composer discusses the role that the rapid development of technology has played in his working life and music.

Central to that influence was the invention of the sampler in the 1970s, a device now in use by musicians of nearly every genre. When Mr. Reich began exploring the sampler’s possibilities some 30 years ago, he became interested in its potential to match any recorded sound to the intricacies of a live performance, a technique he ultimately used in the composition of “Different Trains” (1988), which takes natural rhythms and melodies of taped speech and weaves them with train whistles, sirens and music he wrote for the Kronos Quartet.
Audio On the role of technology in his music, and the genesis of “Different Trains” and “The Cave.” (mp3)

This forward-looking technology led Mr. Reich to look back, too: it became a bridge to his earliest work as a composer. The sampler, he says in the interview, was “a way of going back to pre-recorded voices of ‘Come Out’ and ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ in 1965 and 1966 and bringing it up to the late 80s” and made it possible to “merge the documentary reality and the musical reality into one indissoluble thing.”

“Different Trains” explores the composer’s childhood, his Jewish identity and the fate of the Jews in World War II — and the idea that their fate could have easily been his own. In a 1989 review of a recording of “Different Trains” in The New York Times, K. Robert Schwarz wrote that the work “possesses an absolutely harrowing emotional impact.”

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