This is another excellent interview from Red Bull Music Academy, with legendary minimalist composer and electronic music pioneer Steve Reich.

In the interview, Reich talks about his first experiences with tape recorders:

But I guess I started getting interested when I moved to San Francisco in 1961/’62. I was studying with Luciano Berio, the Italian composer, and what he was working on when I started working with him was a piece called Omaggio O Joyce, meaning James Joyce. His wife, Cathy Berberian, who’s a really good singer, was reading bits of Joyce and he was cutting up the tapes into little pieces, which is what the book is about anyway. This was very far-out non-narrative writing. Basically, you were hearing the sound of letters and not really focusing on their meaning.

He played us two pieces by Stockhausen: one was called Electronic Studies and the other was Gesang Der Jünglinge. And my ear just went (whistles) to Gesang Der Jünglinge.

Why?

Because there was a voice of a young kid and I began to realise I’m not interested in electronics or synthesis. Still not interested. Couldn’t care less. It’s a marriage of convenience but I don’t like it.

I’m interested in really analogue sound, and therefore when the sampler was invented I said: “That’s for me.”

Another thing that was in the air in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s, was tape loops. Raise your hand if you know what a tape loop is (few hands go up). OK, when there was reel-to-reel tape, you could take a splicing block and splice the beginning to the end of a six/seven-inch piece of tape. And the head assembly of these small tape recorders was small enough that you could fit the loop over the head assembly, press the ‘go’ button and it would compress up against the head and play back. You’d be recording at seven-and-a-half inches per second. You’d get very unusual results that nobody had ever heard in the 1950s or ‘60s.

At that time I also became aware of West African music, both, by listening to recordings and by discovering a book called Studies In African Music, which was the first book of accurate scores of music from Ghana.

I think you can find it online, actually. Google are going to steal everything, so I think they managed to get this far. Anybody here have any familiarity with musical notation (some hands go up)? Well, those of you who do, you can see the divisions of subdivisions into 12, patterns in three beats, patterns in four beats, patterns in six beats, patterns in twelve beats. What’s strange is, you say: ”Where’s the downbeat, where’s one?” Well, the rattle has it here, this drummer has it there. That’s from Mars, you know?

Generally, when you listen to rock, you’re in four-four, everyone knows where one is. Here’s a music where there is no one downbeat, there are multiple downbeats depending on the player and they just feel it that way. When I was working with the multiple tape loops and hearing it, I said: “What have I got here, mechanised Africans” (laughs).

The entire interview is interesting – but especially his discussion of the overlapping and interlocking influences of tape loop sampling and African music on Reich’s music.