Composer Reich's Pearl tribute

By Emily Buchanan
BBC News

Steve Reich has been described as America's greatest living composer - moving contemporary classical music away from the atonal minimalism of Schoenberg and Stockhausen.

Steve Reich is marking his 70th birthday in London

He draws on the traditional rhythms of African drumming or Balinese gamelan and experiments with a huge range of instruments and recording techniques. For his 70th birthday, London's Barbican Theatre is holding a retrospective on his life.

Reich's music is synonymous with city living, especially New York, with its high energy, repetitive phrases in perpetual loops.

When I went to the Barbican to interview him he was in ebullient mood, joking that he had often been accused of sounding like a broken record, but now musicians from Riga to Seoul play his music.

Among the pieces being featured is Proverb - a medieval chant transformed into a sensuous ballet with the help of an electric organ and Reich's hallmark - pulsating rhythm and dissonant harmonies.

'Innocent victim'

The festival will conclude on Sunday with the world premiere of a work dedicated to the memory of the American journalist Daniel Pearl - taken hostage and killed by Islamic militants in Pakistan four years ago.

"This is an incident that walked into my life - it's a memorial and remembrance of one innocent victim," Reich said.

Mr Pearl was himself a keen musician, and it was his father who asked Reich to write a piece in memory of his son.

Daniel Pearl was killed by kidnappers in Pakistan in 2002

Daniel Variations is based on sung phrases from Mr Pearl's own writing and the Old Testament Book of Daniel - with its doom-laden story of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Iraq.

"I began to realise this dark dream of Nebuchadnezzar is really the world we live where people are killed because of their religion," he said.

Reich is unafraid of the big themes of politics and history. One of his most influential pieces is Different Trains - a haunting work juxtaposing sounds of his childhood train journeys between New York and Los Angeles, alongside those made by Europe's Jews to the gas chambers - it uses the real voices of eye-witnesses.

Powerful memorial

Reich explained that while political statements by artists are important, they usually have little lasting impact. What remains most of value is the work itself.

He drew the parallel with Picasso's Guernica, a painting done to decry the bombing of a Spanish village by the Germans during the Spanish Civil War.

Reich said it had done nothing to stop more civilian bombing, but as a work of art at least it acted as a powerful memorial to the dead.

He was optimistic about the future of classical music, and about the way people listen in their hectic lifestyles.

"As Chuck Berry would say, 'Any old way you use it,'" he said.

"How many times have you heard the Brandenburg concertos in a coffee shop? It doesn't mean Bach is some cheap sell-out, he's still great because the notes are great.

"Whether you're doing the dishes or you've got the headphones on and you're following the score, my music's got to work or I'm a failure, no cop outs allowed."