For NPRMusic's Daily Breather, Pulitzer-winning composer Steve Reich reveals his secret to weathering the pandemic: just keep working.
Has anything changed about the fact that you're writing it now during the coronavirus crisis? Is any of that filtering into the music at allFirst off, I was having a discussion with someone in Sweden and he told me that he'd recently seen a cartoon, and the first panel drawing said,"Composer at work," and the second panel said"Composer at work in quarantine." And the two panels were identical. And I think that's the truth. [Laughs.
But I see what you are driving at is the nature of the piece,"Traveler's Prayer." In any traditional Jewish Hebrew prayer book there's a travelers prayer called"wayfarer's prayer" or"traveler's prayer," And it's something you would say getting onto an airplane or taking a longer car trip. I am not using the body of that prayer.
Now and again, I ask my mother, who's 88,"Are you thinking about crossing over into that next life?" Is that something taking more of your brain space these days? In terms of specifics, no. Judaism is very adamant about worrying about what's happening here and now. So what I'm concerned about in this piece is really getting it right: getting the music right, getting the setting right, getting the best instrumentation right. All the usual things. Because whatever you've got in mind, if you don't really do a good job on the music, it's all going to fall apart and be irrelevant anyway.
I think that's a kind of tightrope, too. There are other artists who are too self-critical and sort of strangle themselves. And there are people, also, who believe everything they do is just great and they could do with a little more dose of self-criticism. So it cuts both ways.
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