Steve Reich’s encounter with Judaism saw continuous acts of translation. A process by which one thing turns into another while regulating difference—angiographs (controversially) converted into percentages of lumen loss, for example (Law 2004, 59- 60)—translation is defined as “a relation that does not transport causality but induces two mediators into coexisting” (Latour 2005, 108). Reich’s translations of biblical cantillation tropes and Hebrew psalmody into (his) minimalist modules has been a continuous dialectical process, extending from his very first experiments in his sketchbooks (housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland; PSS) during the late 1970s to works like Octet (1979), Tehillim (1981), Different Trains (1988) The Cave (1989-93), Know What Is Above You (1999), You Are (2004), Daniel Variations (2006), Traveler’s Prayer (2020) and Jacob’s Ladder (2023).
But what launched these acts of translations has been evident in Reich’s letters, sketchbooks, appointment books—and nowhere more so than in the pages following the sketchbook entry dated March, 23, 1977 (Steve Reich Collection, PSS). On that day Reich inscribed the Gregorian date alongside the Hebrew one (Nisan 8, 5737) in addition to the Hebrew acronym ב״ה (B”H), which means “with the help of the Name [God].” Both the Hebrew date and the B”H acronym signaled that Reich was in process of becoming a ba’al teshuvah, namely one who repents and returns to Judaism while gradually accepting the yoke of mitzvot; both dates would appear in most entries in the sketchbooks since. In an interview conducted as part of the Oral History of American Music project (December 15-16, 1986), Reich disclosed that he began studying biblical Hebrew (rather than modern Hebrew) in 1974 to gain access to the Torah and its commentaries. “The effect of this study,” he remarked, “was to result in some practice” (OHAM 186, J, 2), which meant neither composing nor holding any meetings on Shabbat and holy days—as his sketchbooks and appointment books also confirm—while exploring his “unclaimed birthright” through the language (OHAM 186, J, 4; Reich Collection, PSS). In practice, however, it was the logogenic performance of the liturgical text, namely, the melodic qualities determined by, and supporting, the words that make up the text (but not its semantics).
Still, three months before Hebrew, Hebrew dates, and drawings of Shabbat candles would become a fixture in Reich’s sketchbooks and appointment books, Reich wrote to Israel Adler, then the director of the Jewish Music Research Centre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (December 19, 1976; appendix 2), seeking to coordinate an ethnographic fieldwork study on Torah readings by “Jews from Bagdad, Kurdistan, and Yemen as well as other oriental Sephardic communities.” This letter and other documents related to Reich’s sojourn to Israel were located in the archive of the Jewish Music Research Centre, which has been recently integrated into the archival collection at the National Library of Israel (NLI, MUS 387) and are published here for the first time (for the complete texts, see Appendix below).
Reich had only two weeks to spend in Israel (February 8-22, 1977) and planned to record readings of Genesis 1:1-13, the Shema, “and perhaps parts of Shir Hashirim” (Song of Songs); in between the lines, he disclosed (confessed?) to his Reform Jewish background, to having been engaged with Hebrew in his Bar Mitzva through transliteration, and how his “religious inclinations” sent him to take adult evening classes in Pentateuch and Hebrew at Lincoln Square Synagogue (Buchwald 2006). By Spring 1976, after studying Abraham Zvi Idelsohn’s Jewish Music in Its Historical Development, Reich took cantillation lessons in “the Western Ashkenazic (Lithuanian) tradition” with Cantor Edward Berman, and within a month he could read Genesis 1:1-13 in addition to the Shema—the same segments he sought to record and transcribe among older non-Ashkenazi communities in Israel (following Idelsohn’s origin story). But rather than familiarizing himself with such foreign liturgical practices, as he stressed to Adler, Reich’s interest lay in deciphering these tropes’ mechanism, beyond the realization of a specific nusaḥ.
This meant that the previously mentioned sketchbook entry of March, 23, 1977 was made after Reich’s fieldwork in Israel (and it also indicates that one of the dates there is incorrect, since March 23, 1977, corresponds to Nisan 4, 5737, and not Nisan 8). But the subsequent pages in this sketchbook reveal ample traces of Reich’s steady path to becoming a ba'al teshuvah, among them his transcriptions of te’amim (biblical tropes) and Sabbat eve recitations of Song of Songs. The latter was first attempted without its text, but by July 8, 1977, or Tamuz 22, 5737 (both dates were correct this time), Reich transcribed the Sabbath eve recitation of Song of Songs 1:1-3 in the Lithuanian nusaḥ together with the tropes he copied meticulously above and under these words, and a transliteration in the Sephardic accentuation (which attests to a non-Ashkenazi interlocutor; Reich Collection, PSS). But transcriptions of this kind were never Reich’s goal. By December he attempted setting the first verse of Song of Songs for voices, piano, bass clarinets, strings, and clapping hands, but seems to have abandoned this project— except the piano part which bred a close variant of the first piano part in opening of the 1979 Octet. At this point Reich seemed to have abandoned textual settings altogether, and most likely because it imposed melodic formations he was not yet ready for (at least not until the 1981 Tehillim, whose simulation of tropes drew on the parallelism in Hebrew psalmody rather than on Torah tropes). Octet fashioned modules of gradually extending melodies that reproduced the mechanism of biblical tropes adjoining into textless combinations of clauses and versets (see rehearsal marks 42B-43 in the piccolo part, and 74-74A in the piccolo and second flute parts); Reich was translating the logogenic qualities of biblical tropes and the way they animate words of unexpected lengths while connecting to other words whose syllabic span remains unsystematic. These simulated-melodies-turned-into-modules would radically extend the phase relationship Reich first explored in the late 1960s and which resulted in patterns drawn on the modal properties of each section in the work (Siôn 2019). But what came into existence through this act of translation also sustained Reich’s distance from both modern Hebrew and Jewish liturgy (as his letter to Adle also discloses), including a too close a mimesis of what still remained foreign to him.
This distance was evident again even when Reich set Hebrew Psalms to music in Tehillim. Unlike It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966), which were speech-based tape works made into speech-song (Fink 2019), Tehillim was his first texted work. After several attempts to set verses from Song of Songs were abandoned (sketches date from July 1977 through February 1978) along with another brief setting (December 1977) of Proverbs 3:7 (the second verset of which might signal the choice of Psalm 34:15 for Tehillim), a transcription of Jonah 1:1-3 in the Ashkenazi nusaḥ dated May 20, 1980 (Reich Collection, PSS) confirms Reich’s 1982 article (“Hebrew Cantillation as an Influence on Composition”; Reich and Hillier 2004, 114) that this was the original plan for what later became Tehillim. The choice of the book of Jonah could be justified liturgically: Not only is Jonah the haftarah read during the afternoon service of Yom Kippur, given its account of the power of repentance (teshuvah), a constituent theme of Yom Kippur, it was also in keeping with Reich’s own penitence and gradual observance as he became a ba'al teshuvah. Reich could have identified with the more universalist theology of an unusual prophet whose five words of prophecy—a minimalist feature by itself—portended annihilation solely to the gentiles in Nineveh (capital of Assyria) to which he is instructed to travel (Sacks 2014; Alter 2019).
But then Jewish liturgy was never the goal for Reich, who diligently abstained from competing with it mimetically. And given his linguistic impediments, it is very likely that his fieldwork in Jerusalem had strengthened this detachment (reserve, even), having realized that the logogenic qualities of the music resulting from biblical tropes and Hebrew psalmody operate regardless of hermeneutics (as indeed they do; Herzog 2007). It is this understanding that seemed to have licensed Reich’s pairing of the mechanism of Hebrew psalmody with the texts he chose for Tehillim (Psalm 19:2-5, 34:13-15, 18:26-27, 150:4-6; in Hebrew Psalmody disjunctives syntactically mark the end of verses while dividing each into versets and further into subphrases; the conjunctives at the same time join words into sub-phrases while gravitating to disjunctives). Doing so, Reich allowing the text’s poetic inconsistencies and elasticities to knead his modules into melodies.
Having found an origin story in Idelsohn’s Jewish Music in its Historical Development, a story in which cantillation moved from the voice through gesture to transcriptions, Reich’s logocentrism transformed everything into text to the point of relinquishing its “residue” of nonlinguistic excess (Fink 2019). Speech fragments were transcribed and performed by live musicians who doubled and imitated them in Different Trains and The Cave (1988 and 1990-93, respectively), thereby turning English into the primary source whose logogenic qualities would transform into text in the form of music literacy—as if cantillations tropes were reified from it in an inverse manner. Since such simulated tropes were numerically few in these works, they lacked any motivations to systematize these imports or the language governing them. Logocentrism would therefore become Reich’s native tongue while his culling through various prerecorded imports would rely on his agency.
While Different Trains and The Cave abided by the logogenic qualities Reich had set to—and as—music, the primary sources culled for the former were testimonies of Holocaust survivors (housed at Yale University and New York Public Library). To the extent that the simulation of biblical tropes spelled Reich’s distance from the liturgical, Different Trains decontextualized the survivors’ testimonies meaning and tone using what Wlodarski terms “suture” (the merging two texts along shared textual or contextual lines to preserve situational or linguistic connections) and “substitution” (replacing words in the original testimony based on Reich’s (mis)hearing, effectively supplanting the survivor’s account with his own reading of its cultural and literary topoi; Wlodarski 2015). But more than that, this substitution affirmed Reich’s narratorial agency in a dialectical process that transitioned from simulated tropes (in Octet) through translation of psalmodic parallelism (in Tehillim, and in the original Hebrew) to speech melodies (in English) that stood in for the ethnographic. Reich’s later works would bear the marks of all of these variables; but as the logocentric connection between what one hears and what one understands remains arbitrary and metonymic (Fink 2019)—paradoxically, much like the liturgical practice itself—it also allows him to uphold his distance from the liturgy.
Abbreviations
OHAM Oral History of American Music
PSS Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel
NLI National Library of Israel, Jerusalem
