Composer Steve Reich, celebrating his 90th birthday, remains a towering figure in modern music through his innovative minimalist techniques. His early works, like *It's Gonna Rain*, pioneered the use of tape loops and phasing to transform spoken word into rhythmic, evolving sonic patterns. Influenced by African drumming and Balinese gamelan, Reich developed a rhythmic language grounded in overlapping patterns and subtle variation. Later, he turned to his Jewish heritage, studying Hebrew cantorial traditions and composing pieces like *Tehillim* and *Different Trains*, which incorporate real human voices—such as those of Holocaust survivors and train passengers—into melodic structures. These compositions reflect a deep engagement with personal and collective memory, blending speech with music to evoke emotional depth. Reich’s music resists traditional narrative arcs, instead relying on repetition and gradual transformation to engage listeners in a new way of hearing. Despite initial resistance from audiences, his work has been widely embraced for its emotional power and originality. His ongoing creativity, from the premiere of *In All Your Ways* to deeply personal works, confirms his enduring legacy as a composer who redefined the possibilities of music through repetition, human voice, and cultural roots.
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli.
Composer Steve Reich celebrates his 90th birthday tomorrow, October 3rd.
Often called one of the fathers of minimalist music,
Reich created a vocabulary that has influenced nearly every form of music,
classical, electronic, jazz, and pop.
Musical venues and performers around the world are marking the occasion.
And at 89, Reich still is making new music.
Here's audio from the world premiere of his latest piece, called In All Your Ways,
unveiled and recorded at the Edinburgh International Festival.
His composition is performed by the Colin Currie Group.
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That's an excerpt from the world premiere of the brand new composition by Steve Reich called In All Your Ways.
It was performed by the Colin Currie Group at the Edinburgh International Festival.
We'll hear more of this piece at the end of the show.
Today on Fresh Air, to celebrate the 90th birthday of Steve Reich,
we'd like to offer our own retrospective of his career.
Let's start with a 1999 interview with Terry Gross.
Terry asked him about one of his early compositions, recorded in 1965, called It's Going to Rain.
This is a tape manipulation.
What principle were you working with in this piece?
Well, I guess really the bottom line principle was that sometimes when people speak, they almost sing.
And there's no better example of that than a black Pentecostal preacher who is really,
it's impossible to say if they're singing or speaking.
It's hovering between the two of them.
And this was a young man who called himself Brother Walter.
It was in the Union Square Park of San Francisco in 64, late 64, when I recorded him.
And he's talking or laughing.
And he's laying it down about the flood in the Bible and Noah and the ark.
And you've got to remember that the Cuban Missile Crisis was in 62.
And a lot of us were thinking that, you know, this was something hanging over everyone's head,
especially in San Francisco at that particular period in the early 60s.
That kind of thinking was rampant that we could be so much radioactive dust in the next day or two.
So this seemed very appropriate for the time in history when I was living and also,
I was going through some difficulties in my own life, which this speech spoke to.
And I was playing with tape loops on a technical level.
The tape loops are little bits of tape that are spliced together back then
so that they just go around and around and around and repeat themselves.
And when you take a bit of speech like, it's going to rain, the way he says it,
you really begin to hear the music of what he's saying and what he says increasingly blended together.
So it's hard to separate them.
It isn't that the text disappears.
It's that it gets.
It's intensified so far as where I hear it.
And then there are actually two loops of his voice going, starting in unison,
and then one slowly creeps ahead of the other.
I just did it with my thumb on the recording reel of one of the machines.
And so they go, what I said was out of phase.
If you like, it's like a cannon around, like row, row, row your boat,
only instead of the, you know, row, row, row your boat gently down the stream.
And on the word merrily, the second voice comes in.
But imagine they both started together and one just started to get faster than the other.
It's hard to do.
And you'd get.
It starts to kind of shaking or reverberation.
And then you'd get this sort of imitation.
And then gradually you'd begin to hear it as a rounder cannon.
And that's exactly what happens in this piece.
Let's hear it.
This is Steve Reich's It's Gonna Rain, originally recorded in 1965.
He began to warn the people.
He said, after all, it's going to rain after all, for 40 days and for 40 nights.
And the people didn't believe him.
And they began to laugh at him.
And they began to mock him.
And they began to say, it ain't gonna rain.
It's gonna rain.
It's gonna rain.
It's gonna rain.
rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain.
It's an excerpt of Steve Reich's It's Gonna Rain, recorded in 1965.
Now, I'm wondering, when you created It's Gonna Rain, were you thinking of it more on an intellectual level?
I wonder what would happen if I did this type of phasing and tape manipulation.
Or was the kind of rhythms and the odd sounds that you were getting as a result of that tape manipulation really, like, aesthetically exciting to you?
Definitely the latter. I don't work as a scientist.
That's not an intellectually, it's not an emotionally rewarding way to work.
I was just following my intuition, just following my nose, so to speak.
And this guy's voice was fantastic.
And it was full of melodic content, and it was full of meaning.
And so I began working with it.
Because I sensed that, you know, there was going to be a lot happening there.
Actually, the going out of phase that first happens was a kind of an accident.
But when I heard it, I thought, this is fantastic.
It's a kind of seamless process that, you know, goes on and on.
And after doing that piece and another piece like it, I then began to apply that principle to live musicians from about 1967 to 1971.
And then sort of moved on from there.
Let's skip ahead to 1971 and another little groundbreaking piece that you did called Drumming.
Now, you wrote this after studying.
African drumming and Balinese gamelan music.
Are there things that you took from those musics that you applied to drumming?
Well, not really, but let's put it this way.
Particularly, Ghanaian drumming acted as a kind of huge pat on the back or green light.
I started studying drums when I was a kid.
I was actually 14.
First, I was studying piano.
And then I finally heard bebop, Miles Davis and the drummer Kenny Clark when I was 14.
And I immediately fell in love.
And I had a friend who was a better piano player than I was.
So I became a drummer.
And when I had gone through music school and sort of swept that under the rug, so to speak,
when I got out of, after Juilliard Mills College in 1963, I said to myself,
well, where in the world is drumming the main voice in the orchestra, so to speak?
And the answer to that is two places, in West Africa, or I guess in East Africa as well, and in Indonesia.
What happened was, in a nutshell, was that,
I felt very strongly that I didn't want to come back and, you know,
imitate the sound of African drums or African bells or either Balinese instruments.
They're very beautiful.
They're very perfect.
But they have their own history.
They have their own tradition.
They have their own context.
And for me, it just felt totally out of place.
The bottom line was this.
I found the thinking, the way the African drumming is organized, which is basically short patterns
in what we would call subdivisions of 12/8, little patterns in 3, patterns in 4, patterns in 6,
superimposed so that their downbeats don't coincide.
So if you say, well, where's the downbeat?
Where's the 1?
Well, the answer is the rattle has it here, the bell has it there, this drum has it somewhere else.
That's a totally different way of organizing music than you find here in the West.
And that idea travels very easily.
It doesn't say anything about sound.
You could have, let's say, you know, take clues of a preacher's voice or,
um,
musical instruments, uh, musical instruments tuned to our, uh, scale.
So, uh, there's no imitation of any African instruments or any specific African, uh, drumming patterns.
But the idea of having, uh, of being able to make a music which is richer than all the electronics that were being made at that time.
And remember, we're talking 1971, Stockhausen is working with a bank of equipment.
John Cage is working with banks of equipment.
And, uh, I felt, well, you know, uh, drums, uh, skin, uh, metal glockenspiel.
Wooden marimbas and the richness of the sound that comes out of those instruments, especially when they're piled on top of each other, multiple marimbas, multiple drums, multiple glockenspiels, is far richer, uh, an experience than, than the sine waves, uh, uh, being sent out at you.
We're going to hear the beginning of the second movement of drumming.
You want to say a little bit about what's happening in this part?
Well, it's interesting.
The second movement is for, uh, for three marimbas played by up to nine, uh, players and two women's voices.
Well, what are the women's voices doing?
Uh, when I started writing the piece, I was working with a multi-track tape recorder.
So I'd play some of the patterns and I'd play against myself and I'd hear like two or three voices at a time.
When I heard them, I thought, hey, I hear somebody singing, but you know, there was nobody singing.
What it was, was that the, the, the marimbas, uh, are pitched and have a very long decay.
It's a long sound.
Even though you're hitting a piece of wood, it rings for a long time because there's a resonator underneath it.
And it begins to sound as if there are women singing kind of like Ella Fitzgerald.
Do-do-do-do-do.
That kind of sound.
We used to call it scat singing.
And so I thought to myself, well,
this is coming from the room.
what if you really did have women in the room,
and what if they really were listening carefully to this,
it was all notated in front of them,
and they began singing some of these patterns
that are really there, but they would reinforce them,
giving, if you like, what, a kind of audible chalk talk.
And that's exactly what's happening here.
You're going to hear these marimba patterns
brought to the surface of the music by the women's voices.
Let's hear it.
This is an excerpt of Steve Reich's Drumming from 1971.
This is an excerpt of Steve Reich's Drumming from 1991.
Now, I've always wondered this.
So many of your pieces deal with repetition
and with slight variations over a long period of repetition.
How do you know what is long enough,
what is the appropriate length for a piece?
Because it doesn't have the kind of narrative arc
of a melodic piece or something,
where there's a climax in a more traditional way.
So how do you gauge that?
How do you gauge the length of one of your pieces?
Well, again, Terry, I think what you said
applies very well to what we just heard
and maybe up to Music for 18 Musicians in 1976.
But after that, the pieces are. Oh, I agree. Yeah, absolutely.
So for these early pieces,
basically the scores when written
and the oral transmission of the information
when it was oral were of the same,
which is you can repeat this bar, I would say,
to James Price or Russ Hartenberger or Bob Becker,
who were the sort of core members of my group
way back when and are still around.
You know, let's say anywhere from 5 to 15 times.
But I don't want you to count those number of times.
I want you to feel, well, that's clear.
Now I'm going to move ahead.
And so therefore the score reflects that.
It gives you certain limits.
For instance, we made a recording of this piece of drumming
for Deutsche Grammophon back, I think, in 74.
And it came out to be an hour and 20 minutes long.
Now that's on the long side, but it's certainly in the ballpark.
We re-recorded it for None Such in 86, I think it was,
and it was 56 minutes, and everybody said,
oh, well, you know, they must have been shortening it for the CD.
Wrong.
We simply were playing it that way.
It was now about 15 years after the piece was written,
and the, what, the zeitgeist or we've gotten older or whatever
had changed, and we just played it a little bit more tersely.
It works either way.
If you play drumming over and it takes you 25 minutes,
that's a mistake.
If you play drumming and it takes you two hours, that's a mistake.
But anywhere between, let's say, 55 minutes and 70 minutes, 80 minutes,
that's okay, and that allows the musician,
the individual player who's making, you know,
who's making a decision at any given moment
to simply judge it as a good musician.
I'm giving that responsibility to them.
They want to do something so that you really get the idea,
and they don't want to bore you.
So that's one of the fringe benefits of playing this kind of piece.
When you were first playing your repetitive pieces,
I was wondering if your audiences had to learn to listen in a different way
and to not. How do you expect that dramatic arc of tension and release
of Western melody and harmony?
Well, you know, a lot of this music has to do with a lot of Western music,
which is prior to 1750.
As a music student, I was. I went to Cornell when I was an undergraduate,
and I studied music history there with William Austin,
who was a very great musician and a wonderful teacher.
And the way he taught Western music history was like this.
He started with Gregorian chant.
I think nowadays people taking over here might start with Hebraic
chant.
And he went up through the death of Johann Sebastian Bach in 1750,
and the next thing he did was Debussy, Duke Ellington,
Gershwin, jazz, Stravinsky, Bartok.
Then when all of that was done,
he started again with Haydn and went up through Wagner.
Now me, I liked the first day of it, of course.
And that's really where I stand, where I've stood all of my life.
And that's, you know, it's an intuitive choice.
It's not. It's how I feel about things.
And there are a lot of community of interest, if you like,
between earlier music, let's say, starting from about 1100,
composers like Perrotin and Leonin,
what was called the School of Organum in Paris,
in the 11th and 12th century, I feel very close to.
Obviously, chronologically, I couldn't be further away.
But this is music which changes very slowly,
which is the earliest music to work in either two, three, or four voices,
which is systematized.
Which is, I think, emotionally very powerful.
And the, what are called the iso-rhythmic techniques,
or certain techniques for repetition that were found a lot in France and Belgium
in 12th, 13th, 14th century, I found really exciting.
I mean, I felt like I'd learned something from that.
Sonata allegro form, the form that drives the symphony and sonata forms
from Haydn up through Wagner,
is something, the narrative form with the climax and the, you know,
the exposition and the development,
and the recapitulation that you're talking about.
And that is a quasi-literary form.
And there are many people who are very in love with that.
And I respect that.
Some of the music is, obviously, some, you know,
towering geniuses who produce music like that.
Personally, I'm not interested.
I'd rather hear, you know, something of Bach or before than any of that period.
And that's reflected in the music that you hear of mine.
In the liner notes to the new CD retrospective,
there's some notes by Michael Tilson Thomas, the conductor,
and he describes playing your composition, "Four Organs," in New York City.
And this was pretty early in your career.
And Thomas writes, "In all my years as a performer,
I have never seen such a reaction from an audience.
There were at least three attempts to stop the performance by shouting it down.
One woman walked down the aisle and repeatedly banged her head on the front
of the stage, wailing, 'Stop, stop, I confess.'
The audience made so much noise that in spite of the fact
that the music was amplified, we were unable to hear one another's playing."
Now, how did you feel when that happened?
I think you were performing on that night.
Oh, I was, yeah.
I was getting lost along with Michael.
He was mouthing the syllables, you know,
"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight."
And, well, you know, it really was a time bomb that I was unaware of.
Michael was, at the time, one of the conductors of the Boston Symphony,
and he had planned this concert of multiples.
We were four organs, and he had a multiple orchestra piece of Mozart.
And he had a piece called "The Liszt Hexameron," which was a piece that Liszt wrote for,
six piano virtuosi of the day, and he had six grand pianos out there.
Well, this was a subscription concert for the BSO in New York at Carnegie Hall in 1973,
and it drew the kind of audience that you might expect,
which in those days was a very conservative, you know, elderly type of audience.
The last thing in the world an audience like that would want to hear
would be a very hard-edged piece for four screaming Farfisa electric organs amplified with maracas.
So he kind of set the stage.
I just wasn't paying attention to that.
I was worrying about rehearsals and electrical plugs and tunings and things like that.
But when it happened, I turned white as a sheet.
But Michael sort of clapped me in the back and said, "Hey, this is history."
Well, did you feel like, "Yes, this is as exciting as the Rite of Spring?
The audience is rebelling against this new and exciting, adventurous music?"
Or did you feel like, "Boy, is this really a mismatch?"
Yeah, I think more of the latter.
I'm not on the epitaph bourgeois, you know, let's shock people bandwagon.
I really, I want people to love what I do and I want them to really, you know, to enjoy it, to love it.
And so I didn't have that feeling.
Perhaps Michael was a little bit more of the provocateur at that time.
He certainly had engineered a situation guaranteed to explode.
And when it did, as I say, I just felt sort of taken aback and, you know, what's going on here.
Maybe in the long run, you know, that was a worthwhile thing for him to have done.
I've never personally tried to present myself with situations whereby
that kind of reaction will happen.
Composer Steve Reich speaking with Terry Gross in 1999.
Michael Tilson Thomas, the conductor Reich was talking about, died this past April.
He was 81.
We'll hear more of Terry's interview with Steve Reich after a break.
I'm David Bianculli and this is Fresh Air.
This is Fresh Air. I'm TV critic David Bianculli.
We're continuing our career retrospective of minimalist composer Steve Reich, who turns 90 tomorrow.
Several professors
concert halls and musicians are having performances of his work. On October 22nd, Carnegie Hall will
host a special birthday concert. Let's get back to Terry's interview with Reich from 1999.
Let's jump ahead to 1981 and hear an excerpt of your composition Tehillim. Now you talked a little
bit about how you'd studied African drumming and Balinese gamelan music. At some point you kind of
explored your own roots in Jewish music and you studied with a Jewish cantor. What sent you back
to studying cantorial music? Well, actually it was a trip to Africa, strange enough. When I was in
Africa, besides studying music, I enjoyed being over there. It was a very, very nice period of
time. And one of the things I admired was the fact that, in fact, there was no notation, as you
observed earlier. Each musician was playing something that they learned from their father,
or their uncle, or, you know, someone in their family. And it had been so passed on that way for,
you know, obviously a couple of thousand years or so. And I thought, you know, when I came back,
gee, you know, isn't there anything like that that I'm a part of? And I thought, wait a minute,
I'm a member of one of the oldest groups on the planet. I know nothing about it. I was raised as
a Reform Jew and I had zero information. I couldn't read Hebrew. I'd never studied Torah. I didn't know
anything about it. I didn't know it was written in a cycle. I didn't know any of the practices.
So I thought to myself, well, maybe I ought to look in my own backyard since I have the foggiest
of what's going on there. And I ended up studying at an Orthodox synagogue on the
Upper West Side of Manhattan and studying Biblical Hebrew and the text of the Torah in its weekly
portions. When I was studying Hebrew, Hebrew, as you may know, is a continental language. There
are no letters for vowels. There's no A-E-I-O-U. Instead, there are little dots or dashes which
are affixed below or above the consonants, and they are the vowel points. When I was studying
Hebrew with my teacher, there was yet another version of the Torah. And I thought, well,
there's another little marking there. And I asked him, I said, well, what's that? He said,
oh, that's the musical notation. I said, really? So I said, well, how do I learn about that? He
said, well, you'd have to study with a candor to do that. So I looked up someone who was at the
Jewish Theological Seminary through a mutual friend, and he taught me a little bit about how
to do it and how the notation worked. And the notation was basically, have you ever looked at
a Greek vase and you see a funny picture of a guy who looks like a conductor and he's sort of
motioning with his hands and the musicians are looking at him? He's not a conductor. He's doing
what the Greeks called a musical notation. He's using his hand as a notational reminder. Hey, it goes like that. And this was a common
way of notating music within cultures prior to our system of notation, which, by the way,
evolved from the human hand. There are five lines on the staff because there are five fingers on
your hand. So. I didn't know that. Yeah, well, you know, live and learn. So I decided to set. Tehillim is basically the word for Psalms, the original word for Psalms. I took about
a small piece of four different Psalms and set them in the original Hebrew. And after years of
doing pieces of a more unusual sort, you've heard a little bit of today, out came a piece which was
very, very melodic in the simplest sense of the word. Well, let's hear the opening of Tehillim.
Tehillim is very, very melodic in the simplest sense of the word.
music. That's because you're using
actual sounds in it, recordings
of real people's voices, real
train whistles, sirens.
Yeah, absolutely.
It goes back to very early pieces that
you probably know, It's Gonna Rain and Come Out, which we're
working exclusively just with a
short snippet of a recorded voice.
So as opposed to, let's say, setting
a text the way
Schubert has done, the way every
composer has done, and the way I've done in, let's say,
Tehillim or the desert music, in different trains
I'm not setting a text, I'm setting human beings.
And it's quite a different situation.
What you did is interview
the governess who took you on the train rides
between New York and Los Angeles. You interviewed
a Pullman porter who worked the trains
on the years that you
rode on them, and you interviewed a few Holocaust
survivors who are the same age
as you are.
And you took fragments of their
speech and used that
as the musical text.
I find
myself saying their lines over
and over becomes kind of like music
even though it's speech
that you're using.
I think what you're driving at is how can the speech
become music, or at least I hope you are.
Yes, exactly.
Because what happened is that I selected each
of these sentences, phrases, single words,
place names, dates, for what they
said to be sure, but also for how they were
said. Sometimes when we
speak, you or I and everybody,
we almost sing. We don't know it, it just goes
by in our conversation. But if you isolate it
on tape, then you find, for instance, in my
governess when she was talking about one of the trips
she said, she said, he went from Chicago
to New York, and it was really, I don't have
perfect pitch, but it was F-A-flat, F-A-flat.
The Pullman Portis
at 1941. And the rule
I set for myself was, every time a woman
speaks, she'll be doubled note for note by the
viola. And every time a man speaks, he'll be
doubled note for note by the cello.
And my job is to arrange,
harmonize, and write
counterpoint to something that
is a given that I can't change. And that was
quite an enjoyable restriction.
The first
movement of different trains is set
in the United States, based
on your rides back and forth between 1939
and 1942 between New York and
Los Angeles. The second
movement is the Holocaust.
And there's an incredible musical
shift that happens right
between the first and second movements. Would you
describe for us what you're doing there?
Well, what happens right on the button is that
the air raid sirens begin right
as Rachella, who's a
woman from Rotterdam now living in Oregon,
says, 1940. Musically,
I wanted to get something that would come in like
a, you know, like an absolute
knife stroke and just
divide those movements, even though there's no
time between them.
1941.
1941, I guess it must have been.
1940.
1940.
1940.
1940.
1940.
1940.
1940.
1940.
1940.
Oh, my God.
In the third
and final movement of "Different Trains,"
the movement
opens with something closer
to more traditional violin playing,
string quartet playing, than we've heard earlier on.
Right. Why?
Well, what happens at the beginning of the
third movement is da-da-dee-da-da-da.
Da-da-dee-da-da-da-da-da-dee-da-da-da-da-da.
Well, you've been so used to hearing voices,
you wonder what that is. Well, actually, what it is,
it's Paul, the Hungarian
now living in Boston, saying,
"And the war was over. Da-da-dee-da-da-da."
But you don't hear him first, because there has been
so much speech, so much train whistle,
so much siren, so much
noise, that the third
movement begins to move away from all of
this towards music, towards
some kind of resolution of this music.
This situation, which of course can't be resolved, but
there is, I think,
a good attempt at that
in the third movement. I think a successful attempt
at it in the third movement.
What's happening in the third movement is that that paradiddle
rhythm of the train has stopped,
and now all the rhythms,
all the music, are going to come out of these
speech patterns. Da-da-dee-da-da-da
is multiplied into the cello,
into the viola, into the two violins of the quartet,
so that when he finally
says, "And the war was over," his voice is
surrounded, if you like, as a mosaic
of tiles, each tile being, in fact,
a musical rendition of what he
says. There is no
other train rhythm
overriding that, and that's what separates
the third movement from the other two movements.
"And the war was over."
"And the war was over."
"And the war was over."
That's an excerpt from
"Different Trains" by Steve Reich.
Now, let's hear some more
from his latest work.
This is performance audio from the world premiere
performance of "In All Your Ways,"
performed by the Colin Curry Group
at the Edinburgh International Festival.
at the Edinburgh International Festival.
music
music
music
music
music
music
music
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The film was produced by The Guardian and directed by the Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Schor, who previously worked together on the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land.
Nasa opens in theaters in New York this week and begins streaming for free worldwide in November.
Our film critic Justin Chang has this review.
For most of the shattering and damning new documentary Nasa, we are on a series of rooftops in Tel Aviv, watching the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham conduct one-on-one interviews with Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel.
The rooftop footage was filmed at night, mostly by Abraham's co-director, Rachel Schor, and their interview subjects, 24 of them in total, are all cloaked in darkness.
We're told that their appearances and voices have been digitally altered to protect their anonymity.
In precise detail, they speak about their role in launching the airstrikes that have killed thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza since the Hamas attacks of October 7th, 2023.
Unsurprisingly, Nasa has already stirred considerable outrage, much of it, it should be noted, from people who haven't seen and maybe never will see it.
Abraham and Schor, both Israeli filmmakers, have been denounced as traitors in Israel, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself has threatened to revoke their citizenship.
The anonymization of sources has been one of the more contested issues.
Israel supporters have said it discredits the soldiers' testimony, while Palestine supporters have criticized the film for shielding self-confessed war criminals.
Without the promise of anonymity, of course.
In other words, Nasa as a film wouldn't exist.
But the reporting that it presents would exist.
Much of it has already been published in outlets including Plus 972 magazine, an Israeli-Palestinian publication, Local Call, a Hebrew-language outlet, and The Guardian, which co-produced the film.
Abraham wrote many of those investigative pieces himself.
He's also credited the many Palestinian journalists who brought these revelations to light.
"The testimony is riveting. Some of the interview subjects speak,
about how they were motivated to help the Israeli military annihilate Hamas after October 7th.
Some express guilt and regret for their involvement.
Others see themselves as cogs in a necessary war machine.
But for the most part, the filmmakers are less interested in the questions of why than in the mechanics of how.
They want us to understand how these systems of remote surveillance and mass killing work,
and to grasp the horrific scale of the civilian deaths.
NAZA is an acronym for Nezek Agavi, Hebrew for Collateral Damage.
It refers to the estimated number of civilian casualties considered acceptable by the Israeli military.
Twenty NAZA would mean that up to 20 civilian deaths were approved in the elimination of a single target.
For one high-value target, a figure of 500 NAZA was approved.
The population of a small Israeli town, Abraham notes.
The logistics of trackings and killings are calmly and methodically laid out.
Because the military can hack into any Palestinian's phone in Gaza,
their power of surveillance is near total.
We learn about the military's practice of bombing the homes of suspected Hamas operatives at night,
while their wives and children were with them.
We also hear about the widespread use of AI systems
to gather intelligence, much of it faulty, about potential targets.
One of the most chilling passages describes a tracking technology referred to as
Where's Daddy?, which uses children's words to confirm whether their targeted fathers are at home.
One soldier talks about having used this method on a 12-year-old girl, saying,
You hack her phone, and then you kill her.
At one point, Abraham asks a subject if Israel is committing a genocide.
Without hesitating, he responds,
Yes, completely.
As the film notes, more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7th,
and the death toll continues to rise.
I've watched Naza twice now, both times in a state of quiet horror and fury,
and with enormous admiration for Abraham and Shor's courage in holding their government to account.
My admiration extends to the unerring precision of their filmmaking,
Naza runs just 77 minutes.
It doesn't linger on the atrocities it describes,
mainly because there are so many of them to address.
There's some archival material, including footage from the early days of Israeli intelligence
and the building of Tel Aviv in the 1920s.
But most of the imagery we see is of modern-day Tel Aviv at night.
Shor's camera captures the glittering lights of the city
and often peers into apartment windows,
showing us Israeli intelligence.
Israeli citizens working out, eating meals, and watching the news.
There's tremendous power, and I think a stealthy indictment,
in these everyday images.
It's as if the filmmakers are holding up a mirror image to Gaza,
turning our thoughts toward the thousands of slain Palestinians
who were, once upon a time, also just going about their evenings.
The most radical thing about Naza isn't that it exposes the machinery of death.
It's the film that's the most radical.
It's the film's insistence on the value of Palestinian life.
Justin Chang is film critic for The New Yorker.
He reviewed the new documentary, Naza.
It opened in theaters in New York this week
and will stream for free worldwide in November.
To keep up with what's on the show,
and get highlights of our interviews,
follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air.
You can subscribe to our YouTube channel
at youtube.com slash thisisfreshair.
We're rolling out new videos with in-studio guests,
behind-the-scenes shorts,
and iconic interviews from the archive.
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Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by
Phyllis Myers,
Roberta Shorrock,
Anne-Marie Baldonado,
Lauren Krenzel,
Monique Nazareth,
Thea Chaloner,
Susan Yakundi,
Anna Bauman,
and Nico Gonzalez-Whistler.
Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesper.
Our social media video producer is Hilary Kissinger.
For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley,
I'm David Bianculli.
I'll see you next time.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Steve Reich, a pioneer of minimalist music, continues creating new works at 89, including the recent piece *In All Your Ways*, premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival.
His early work, such as *It's Gonna Rain*, used tape loops and phasing to blend spoken voices—like a preacher’s speech—into evolving, rhythmic patterns that mimic musical form.
Reich drew inspiration from African drumming and Balinese gamelan music, adopting their rhythmic structures of overlapping, non-syncopated patterns to create rich, layered textures in works like *Drumming*.
He explored his Jewish heritage through study of Hebrew cantorial music, leading to compositions like *Tehillim* and *Different Trains*, which use real human voices and speech to form melodic, emotionally resonant music.
Reich’s pieces emphasize repetition, subtle variation, and listener engagement, with lengths determined by musical intuition rather than narrative structure.
His music often challenges Western expectations of form and drama, instead evoking emotional resonance through gradual transformation and organic listening.
The audience reactions to his early performances, such as the chaotic response to *Four Organs*, highlight the disruptive and transformative power of his music.
Reich’s work remains deeply rooted in human experience, using voices, speech, and memory to explore history, trauma, and the nature of sound itself.
Summary:
Composer Steve Reich, celebrating his 90th birthday, remains a towering figure in modern music through his innovative minimalist techniques. His early works, like *It's Gonna Rain*, pioneered the use of tape loops and phasing to transform spoken word into rhythmic, evolving sonic patterns. Influenced by African drumming and Balinese gamelan, Reich developed a rhythmic language grounded in overlapping patterns and subtle variation.
Later, he turned to his Jewish heritage, studying Hebrew cantorial traditions and composing pieces like *Tehillim* and *Different Trains*, which incorporate real human voices—such as those of Holocaust survivors and train passengers—into melodic structures. These compositions reflect a deep engagement with personal and collective memory, blending speech with music to evoke emotional depth. Reich’s music resists traditional narrative arcs, instead relying on repetition and gradual transformation to engage listeners in a new way of hearing.
Despite initial resistance from audiences, his work has been widely embraced for its emotional power and originality. His ongoing creativity, from the premiere of *In All Your Ways* to deeply personal works, confirms his enduring legacy as a composer who redefined the possibilities of music through repetition, human voice, and cultural roots.
FAQs
Steve Reich is known as one of the founders of minimalist music, whose work has influenced classical, electronic, jazz, and pop genres through the use of repetition, phasing, and structured variation.
Created in 1965, 'It's Gonna Rain' uses tape manipulation and phasing of a preacher's voice to create a rhythmic, evolving soundscape that blends speech and music, reflecting both the anxiety of the Cold War era and Reich's intuitive approach to composition.
Reich discovered phasing by accident while manipulating tape loops of a preacher’s voice, where two voices were played in unison and gradually shifted out of phase, creating a resonant, evolving texture he found musically compelling.
Reich was inspired by African drumming and Balinese gamelan music, particularly their use of overlapping rhythmic patterns that don’t align on downbeats, which led to a new approach to rhythmic structure in his compositions.
He uses real recordings of people—such as train travelers and Holocaust survivors—serving as musical text, where their speech is repeated, layered, and harmonized to create melodic and emotional depth, as in 'Different Trains'.
The piece is divided into three movements: one based on train rides, another on the Holocaust, and a final movement that transitions to more traditional string-based music, symbolizing a shift from speech to resolution and reflection.
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