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Steve Reich meets Radiohead with 'Radio Rewrite'

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American composer Steve Reich()
American composer Steve Reich()
Steve Reich is indisputably one of the most influential composers of the last 50 years, and has dabbled in multiple genres. Until recently, however, he had never listened to Radiohead. Now that’s changed in a big way, and Reich’s composition Radio Rewrite pays tribute to the band, writes Adam Zwi.

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When Steve Reich first met Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood, he had never listened to any of the legendary band’s music. The composer was escaping a messy project in London and had travelled to a Polish festival to hear Greenwood perform Electric Counterpoint—a Reich composition famously recorded by Pat Metheny in 1987. Watching Greenwood perform his own version of the piece prompted Reich to take an interest in the guitarist and his band’s extensive catalogue.

A lot of people ask, 'Where’s the Radiohead?' If you really know these two songs well, you will hear them here and there. But there are long stretches where you won’t hear them, even if you do know them.

‘I knew that he had been a violist originally, had been trained at Oxford, that he could read [notated music] and that he was a composer,’ says Reich. ‘I’d heard some of his music in There Will Be Blood. So I knew this is an interesting guy.’

‘Sure enough, we met, we hit it off, we enjoyed our time together talking about music and lots of other things. I came home and I thought to myself, “gee, this guy’s great. I know about this band but I’ve never heard a note of their music.”’

‘So I listened to a number of things, watched a number of videos, and two tunes leapt out at me.’

Those two tunes served as the inspiration for Reich’s 2012 composition Radio Rewrite, which has just been released on CD by Nonesuch Records. The first Radiohead track was ‘Everything In Its Right Place’, the opening track from Radiohead’s Grammy award-winning album Kid A. The second was ‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place’ from Radiohead’s 2008 release In Rainbows.

‘Everything In Its Right Place’ is a dissonant, ominous song in which Greenwood uses samplers to loop and manipulate singer Thom Yorke’s vocal lines (he doesn’t even pick up a guitar when Radiohead plays the song live).

Reich describes it as ‘a marvellous three-chord rock song, with three chords you won’t hear in any other rock ’n’ roll song’. It was the melodic intervals on the oft-repeated word ‘everything’ that really grabbed his attention, however.

Related: Steve Reich on rhythm and minimalism

‘If you had to say, “What is Western harmony?”, boiling it down to two chords, the tonic and the dominant, the G chord and the C chord—that would be the “everything” from which everything else developed, which indeed it did over time,’ says Reich.

‘I’m sure Thom Yorke did it entirely intuitively, without even thinking about it. It was amusing, and I thought, “Well, I’ve just got to use that in a piece.”’

‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place’ is a faster song, with jangling guitars, a rollicking feel and a more conventional time signature.

‘It was the harmonic progression that interested me,’ says Reich. ‘I took a number of liberties with it, but you can hear it right away at the beginning of Radio Rewrite, in the very first movement.’

Reich’s composition has five movements, named ‘I. Fast’, ‘II. Slow’, ‘III. Fast’, ‘IV. Slow’, and (you guessed it) ‘V. Fast’. He describes the slow movements as ‘darker, more mysterious, and more obviously based on ‘Everything In Its Right Place’. They’re more atmospheric,’ he says, ‘a very nice contrast to the settings of ‘Jigsaw’ in the faster movements.’

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How much Radiohead is actually discernible in these pieces? Radio Rewrite uses elements of the Radiohead tracks as a jumping off point, but the end product is quite different.

‘It’s a Steve Reich piece with musical materials—some melodic and some harmonic—that I chose from Radiohead,’ explains the composer. ‘A lot of people ask, “Where’s the Radiohead?” If you really know these two songs well, you will hear them here and there. But there are long stretches where you won’t hear them, even if you do know them.’

‘I had no intention of writing a rock-sounding piece, because I had done that, and I wasn’t really interested in that. The only rock instrument which does appear is the electric bass, which, I must say, is my favourite of all the rock instruments.’

Despite collaborating with rock musicians—and often composing for rock instruments—Reich was not raised on a rock ’n’ roll diet.

‘I was born in 1936, but I had no interest in rock ’n’ roll whatsoever when I was growing up. I wasn’t interested in Elvis Presley, or Fats Domino, or Bill Haley, or any of that stuff. I heard their names and couldn’t believe anybody would listen to them!’

Instead, Reich focussed his attention on jazz—Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane (‘he had an enormous influence on me’).

His exposure to rock only began while studying composition at the prestigious Juilliard School, where a classmate named Phil Lesh (who later founded The Grateful Dead) encouraged Reich to listen to The Beatles’ LPs.

‘I thought, “Now these guys are really onto something”. That’s the first time I ever listened to rock ’n’ roll with the slightest interest. But basically, I really haven’t had much to do with rock throughout my life.’

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Nevertheless, the boundary between Reich and the world of rock music began to blur in the 1970s.

‘It was very gratifying when, in 1974, my ensemble was playing in Queen Elizabeth Hall. A guy comes up after the show with long hair and lipstick and says, “How are you doing? I’m Brian Eno.”’

‘That felt to me like poetic justice, because the kind of people who were listening to Brian Eno in 1974 were the kind of people who were listening to Miles Davis and Charlie Parker in 1954—and I was one of them!’

Over the next few decades, rock musicians like Eno and Greenwood would consistently turn to Reich for inspiration. Now, the composer has repaid the tribute.

The Music Shown is two hours of conversation and music, broadcast live. Gregorian chant or hip hop, k.d. lang or a rookie conductor, all get the attention they deserve.

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Music (Arts and Entertainment)