In 1999, Kronos performed Steve Reich’s Different Trains. Later that spring, we presented the West Coast premiere of Reich’s The Cave. This was quite a production with five video screens, 18 laser disk players, instrumentalists and singers performing live to precisely prepared video that perfectly fit the music (or the other way around?). Steve Reich is certainly one of, if not the most, important living American composers. We are honored to be a small part of his world. He was a pioneer of so-called minimalist music. I love his take on it:
"The point is, if you went to Paris and dug up Debussy and said, 'Excusez-moi Monsieur…are you an impressionist?' he'd probably say 'Merde!' and go back to sleep. That is a legitimate concern of musicologists, music historians, and journalists, and it's a convenient way of referring to me, Riley, Glass, La Monte Young [...] it's become the dominant style. But, anybody who's interested in French Impressionism is interested in how different Debussy and Ravel and Satie are—and ditto for what's called minimalism. [...] Basically, those kinds of words are taken from painting and sculpture, and applied to musicians who composed at the same period as that painting and sculpture was made [...]. "Reich’s work is often poignantly moving and about our own time. The Cave explores the thread of Abraham, linking Israelis, Palestinians and Americans. Different Trains references different train whistles and track sounds – some from the composer’s childhood as he traveled coast to coast and others that were used to transport contemporaneous European children to their deaths under Nazi rule. Recently performed at the Ojai Festival, his Daniel Variations of 2006 uses text from the biblical book of Daniel and from the words of Daniel Pearl, the American-Jewish reporter, kidnapped and murdered by Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan in 2002. A new work for our concert, WTC 9/11 is from the same sensibility. Serious stuff. WTC 9/11 is made possible by a commissioning consortium of which we are a part made possible by a generous gift from Don and Karen Evarts. We are also grateful to Elizabeth and Henry Segerstrom for their sponsorship of this performance.
