In retrospect, I wonder what possessed me when I arranged to hear Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians played three times in a row, over a three-and-a-half-hour span, at the Park Avenue Armory. Well, to be honest, I know what some of the rationale was, including 1) I have loved Music for 18 Musicians from the very first time I heard it live; 2) I‘ve admired almost every performance or artwork or combination of the two that I’ve seen at the Park Avenue Armory over the years; and 3) it was a very hot ticket and I was exceedingly lucky to get one.
Walking into the Drill Hall on Saturday night, I was immediately given the sense that I was at an event. The lighting—superbly designed throughout the show by Urs Schönebaum—gave us a starry dark-blue sky, illuminated by concentric rings of small white spotlights that circled above our heads, even as we were taking our seats in either the beach-style recliners or the well-raked bleachers surrounding the ground-level stage. My seat (Section 400, C10) left nothing to be desired: I was three risers up in a comfortable chair, directly facing the action on the stage. And since the first of the three performances was to be by the Steve Reich Ensemble itself, I knew I was bound to enjoy it.
I felt ready for it all.
But things started to go wrong the minute those highly skilled musicians—dressed identically, as always, in white shirts and black slacks, as if to disappear as individuals into the music—began their performance at the center of the staging area. The problem was not with the music, which was perfect and entrancing. The problem was the woman sitting next to me. At the first few rhythmic notes that emanated from the strings, the pianos, and the marimbas (soon to be supplemented by clarinets, bass clarinets, xylophones, a metallophone, and women’s voices), she began an unbroken, regularly timed, self-induced waggling and wiggling of her head, body, arms, and hands. It was as if she were attending a Golden Gate Park happening amid all her similarly mind-altered friends. At its best, this kind of thing can make me crazy, but at a Steve Reich concert, where everything depends on the interplay among the complex and slightly altering rhythms, a distraction of this sort makes me want to kill. I looked around the Drill Hall: my oblivious seatmate was the only person visibly performing in this manner.
We had been told we could move around freely during the intermissionless three-plus hours, so I got up out of my seat and took an empty one a row down from me. I was foiled, however, by the late arrival of its possessor, and therefore had to return to my own hag-haunted place. For a while I tried to block out the unnecessary motions by holding my hand up to the side of my face; I also tried to focus more than I otherwise would have on the wonderful lighting effects, which gave me a reason to turn my head away from the stage. But I desperately wanted to watch those players, with their intense focus and their charmingly coordinated exchanges of position and their utter mastery of this seemingly repetitive but actually quite complicated piece, so again and again I was drawn back to watching the center, with all that peripheral nonsense still in view.
At the end of this first rendition of Music for 18 Musicians, there was a moment—actually a prolonged few seconds—of absolute silence from the stage and the audience. That was wonderful. Then there was the customary applause, soon enough followed a brief but portentous episode on the violin by the composer Caroline Shaw, who appeared in person, first being draped in a succession of robes by nameless acolytes, and then playing her Viaduct interlude for us. Luckily the performance was such that no head-wagging could occur to it.
My dreaded seatmate started up again, though, as soon as the Manhattan School of Music students, embodied in a group called Tactus, had taken their various places around the edge of the stage area and started in on Music for 18 Musicians once again. These were the second-round performers, and they came across as notably different from the Steve Reich Ensemble. They were dressed quite variously in what I took to be their own clothes—mostly casual, a few with fancy touches—and they were all young and eager to engage. The new problem (as if I needed another) was that they too were now making extraneous motions of body, hands, and head, as if this stringently uninterpretable piece had to be made somehow more human for us. My irritation at unnecessary distraction now had the whole performance area to contend with, and though this slightly diminished my irate focus on my neighbor—I have only so much irritation to go around—it did not improve my mood.
That choreographer-assisted brand of exuberant individuality struck me as exactly the wrong direction for a performance of Music for 18 Musicians to take. One of the many beauties of the piece, as the Steve Reich musicians had shown, is the way it conveys the machine-like traits of precision and repetition along with the very human qualities of variability and exhaustion. There is something precious and extremely moving about the moments when a single marimba player, on the verge of wearing out after a long period of intense note-playing, gives way to another player hovering at his or her shoulder, mallets at the ready, who takes over without any break in the rhythm. Such images were utterly gone from the student performance—and so, I have to say, was the exactness that stems from a closely clustered group of players. One could recognize that this was supposed to be the same piece of music as the one we had just heard, but in its new, relaxed incarnation, it was definitely fuzzier and less on-the-mark. I suppose a more cheerful audience member (or a relative of the students) would have thought it more folksy and casual and “fun,” but my temper had worn too thin to appreciate it.
The hellish occupant of C9 decided to depart during the brief break between the second and third renditions. I thought that might leave me free to enjoy the final performance of the piece by Alarm Will Sound, the ensemble led by Alan Pierson, whose idea this whole extravaganza was. But by then I was too crabby—and perhaps too worn out—to put up with the staging and the costuming. This time the musicians did not move around, but nor were they grouped tightly together, as the Steve Reich players had been. So their coordinated precision in rendering the score, while noticeable better than the students’, was still at a disadvantage. Worse, though, were the priestly robes that all of them, men and women, wore to convey the sacredness of this particular piece of modern music. I don’t mean cassocks and dog collars and that type of priest-garb: these costumes were brightly colored Renaissance-Faire-style draperies, apparently connoting some obscure ancient religion, or perhaps one that has yet to come into being.
Maybe because I was overexposed to such trappings during my California childhood, this sort of thing really gets up my atheistic nose—especially, as I’ve suggested, when it is applied to something that is as grandly, emphatically self-sufficient as Music for 18 Musicians. Some artworks are not meant to be brought into our daily interpretive world, with its clamoring need for instant accessibility and comprehension. Some things are best left aloof and mysterious and alluring, free from any encapsulating meanings one might try to apply to them. And Music for 18 Musicians, as I am now convinced more than ever, is one of those artworks.