By opening the concert with the starkly simple Clapping Music, Reich created the impression that it was the seed for the larger works that would follow in the concert and in the years to come. In his writings Reich conveys a very logical sense of his own development. There seems to be a straight line from Clapping Music to Drumming to Music for Mallet Instruments to Six Pianos, each work building on its predecessor until Reich reaches nirvana in Music for 18 Musicians. As I came to know Reich's oeuvre, I learned that Clapping Music actually marked the beginning of a second phase in his work, following a near-fatal trip to Ghana in 1970. In 1964 Reich had come upon phasing by accident when he was editing a tape recording of a black preacher; he misaligned two tape loops, setting in motion a process that transformed the preacher's words into abstract sounds. The result was Reich's opus one, It's Gonna Rain. In 1966 he refined this technique in another piece for tape, Come Out, which premiered at a benefit concert for the retrial of the "Harlem Six," a group of black youths charged with committing a murder during the 1964 Harlem riots. The voice of Daniel Hamm, a 19-year-old member of the Harlem Six--five of whom, including Hamm, were later acquitted--is first heard clearly saying, "I wanted to come out and show them." The phrase "Come out and show them" is then transformed through phasing to become an evolving series of rhythms, timbres and pitches. These early works remain fascinating, but their politics is troubling. They seem to spring directly from the civil rights struggle, and yet the phasing process calls attention away from the meaning of words to their sounds. A similar critique could be made of Drumming, where Reich extracted West African rhythms from their context and imposed on them a sophisticated process of transformation unrelated to their traditional forms. Was Reich, like many modernists before him, simply going primitive? All of Reich's music, like much American classical music, stands in a complicated relationship to popular music in general and to African-American genres of popular music in particular. Reich's stylized African drumming fits neatly into the tradition of Ives's hyperactive imitations of ragtime and Copland's Debussyan reflections on the blues. Reich has described Drumming as a non-African extension of the phasing technique, but there is an African, or African-American, presence in almost all his music--most provocatively in the voice of a Pullman porter in Different Trains (1988)--hinting that more complex motives are at work.

At the time, though, Reich's stylistic turn with Clapping Music seemed simply aesthetic. He had dropped the use of tape loops (at least for a few years) and also had called a moratorium on the more arcane conceptualism of works like Pendulum Music; instead, his works were performed by live musicians and, as he predicted in 1970, re-embraced tonal harmonies. Already clearly opposed to "uptown" music, Reich broke any lingering connections he had with the bohemian Cageian "downtown." No more futuristic technology, no more conceptual games: Reich seemed to recast himself almost as a folk musician, or at least a musician with an ear for folk music. Going tonal for Reich did not mean going back to Bach; Six Pianos (1973) sounded more like the diatonic, folky sections of Petrouchka, while the luminously scored polyphony of the Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboard (1979) recalled Ravel. Tonal harmonies soon produced tonal melodies, or at least Stravinskian modal ones, as in Tehillim, the first of Reich's settings of Jewish texts. When I first heard it, Tehillim struck me as surprisingly close in style to Bernstein's popular Chichester Psalms; both works locate their notion of Jewishness in Israel rather than the shtetl.

Just when Reich seemed to be drifting away from his radical beginnings, he changed course again. With a series of pieces called "Counterpoint," written for soloists and prerecorded tapes, he reopened the technological explorations of his early works; and then in Different Trains, for string quartet and tape, he found a new use for the connections between recorded speech and musical patterns of It's Gonna Rain. Once again the music was political, but here the subject was the Holocaust. Reich addressed the central aesthetic and moral issue of post-Holocaust art head-on: The art can never approach the horror of its subject. Rather than trying to create an illusion of the horror, as Schoenberg had done in A Survivor From Warsaw, Reich built Different Trains on the impossible distance between those who had perished and those whose lives, thanks to the accidents of place and time, were untouched. During World War II, Reich and his nanny traveled back and forth comfortably between the homes of his divorced parents in New York and Los Angeles. In Different Trains, composed for the Kronos Quartet, he juxtaposed recordings of a black porter on the Super Chief he rode between New York and Los Angeles during the war with the voices of Holocaust survivors who had endured train rides to the camps. The musical patterns of their fragmented reminiscences generate melodic and rhythmic ideas played by a live string quartet and prerecorded strings. The live players, appropriately, seem trapped in a musical environment beyond their control or understanding.

Different Trains reflected not only Reich's deepening sense of his Jewish identity but also the influence of his wife, video artist Beryl Korot. Her work Dachau 1974 (viewable at www.pbs.org/auschwitz/dachau) is a four-channel "visual tapestry." Images of a visit to the camp are played on four TV screens. As Korot describes it, "Each channel is assigned a slightly separate rhythm of image and one-second black pause for the duration of the work. These pauses interrupt the narrative, allowing identical images to be played against one another but with slightly different timings." In other words, Korot employed a visual phasing process akin to the musical phasing of her husband's work. There is no music in the piece, however; there is only the sound of tourists plodding through the camp. At one moment, for no given reason, there is a short burst of laughter, which rattles horrifyingly as the phasing process amplifies and multiplies its sound. Korot's work seems the complement of Reich's, not just by being visual but more by dealing with areas of experience far from the joyous affirmation of his music. Korot's art challenged Reich to confront his own shadows.

Korot and Reich did not actually collaborate until The Cave (1990-93), based on taped interviews Reich made with Israelis, Palestinians and Americans at the biblical site of Abraham's cave. Their second collaboration, Three Tales (2002), deals with the crash of the Hindenburg, atomic tests at Bikini and the cloned sheep Dolly; in many ways its spiritual critique of technical progress makes it a parallel to Koyaanisqatsi, Philip Glass's collaboration with film director Godfrey Reggio. Critical opinion has been widely divided on the Reich/Korot collaborations. I like the way Reich has allowed the subject matter of Three Tales to broaden his sound palette and loosen up his harmonies--it is refreshing to hear him sacrificing his habitual and alluring sonic sheen. Reich has called these works his operas, and they may point the way to a musical theater where live performance and technology interact in much more interesting ways than they do in today's opera houses. But opera, for me, is erotic in its essence, and it would be interesting to see what would happen if Korot and Reich took on a subject where the politics was also personal.

In many respects Steve Reich reminds me of Aaron Copland. His music has a similar economy of means, an almost puritanical severity and control that seem justified when the music delivers, as it so often does, a vision of the promised land. Like Copland, Reich began as an uncompromising, hard-edge rebel (Reich's Four Organs is the equivalent of Copland's Piano Variations) and later revealed a warmer and more varied humanity. Reich's music, like Copland's, is American in its idealism--and that ideal is spiritual. Both Copland and Reich are religious composers, even though Copland did not consider himself religious whereas Reich is an Orthodox Jew. Although both composers write happy music, Reich gets to happy more easily than Copland did, maybe too easily: The lonely, blues-haunted mood of Music for the Theater, or the Piano Sonata, has, so far, little parallel in Reich's work.

Copland, though, made his peace with the concert hall, aided by two powerful conducting allies, Koussevitzky and Bernstein. Although Reich has had his champions in the classical sector, most notably Michael Tilson Thomas, he has resisted compromise with the habits of orchestral music-making. The plush sound of the Romantic orchestra holds little attraction for him; his Variations sound like Perotin, not Mahler. Reich writes for instruments with a precise understanding of their character akin to Stravinsky's, but he is not interested in conventional virtuosity and has, to date, written no concertos. From his early works, moreover, Reich, while rejecting most of the developments in electronic music, embraced the technologies of mechanical reproduction, overdubbing and amplification--all still anathema in the classical world. A Reich performance is a complex dance of hands-on musicianship and technical sophistication, as live musicians often must synchronize with rerecorded sounds and then the entire mix of live and recorded elements is carefully kept in balance. Perhaps surprisingly, the result--when all elements work--is neither loud nor synthetic but present, even intimate. Sometimes the avant-garde is right: Most composers today work with a sound engineer, and classical audiences have come to accept and even demand the artfully controlled, electronically enhanced ambience on which Reich's music depends.

For years Reich kept tight control over performances of his music and largely limited them to his own ensemble. This may have made good business sense, but any music benefits from varied interpretation. A good way to celebrate Steve Reich's 70th would be to buy a fistful of CDs. Nonesuch has re-released many of its Reich-led recordings on a five-CD set, Phases; the recording of the exquisitely fashioned Proverb (1995) is worth the price of the whole, though there is something about Nonesuch's production style that seems to take the edge off all the edgy music it admirably releases. Even more interesting are two performances a bit further from Reich's inner circle. On the Cantaloupe label you can hear a splendid performance of Tehillim and an even more revelatory reading of Desert Music (1984) conducted by Alan Pierson with Ossia, a student group from the Eastman Conservatory and the hot new-music orchestra Alarm Will Sound. Or for something further afield from previous recordings, try the Naiveclassique CD with David Robertson conducting the Orchestre National de Lyon of Different Trains and Triple Quartet, recently re-arranged by Reich for large string orchestra. These new arrangements put two major Reich works within the reach of most symphony orchestras. Now that's a reason to clap hands.

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