Steve Reich's "Tehillim:" Walking, Thinking, and Dreaming

When we finally got to contemporary music in my undergraduate studies, the topic was noticeably rushed. Perhaps this reflected the musical preferences of my professor, who seemed to get bogged down by his passion for romanticism, or perhaps it was because the 20th century was still in progress, but at any rate, we were encouraged to fend for ourselves on the subject. I was enthralled by what little I had heard, and I made a list of composers that I wanted to follow up on if the chance presented itself. Fortunately, this happened in the mid 90s when I was working at the Blockbuster Music in Lewisville. This flagship store prided itself on its dedicated “classical” department. When promotional materials came in from 20th century composers, there was very little competition from anyone else in the store, so I slowly began to check names off the list.

I felt somewhat familiar with minimalism by way of Philip Glass, so Steve Reich, being lumped into the same category in the textbook, earned a spot on my list. In 1994, I picked up a release of Tehillim, which I brought home and proceeded to not listen to.…at all….for nearly five years. Stubborn, stubborn, stubborn.....

In retrospect, I don’t exactly know why I took it off the shelf in 99, but I know I did. I distinctly remember listening to it in my discman (remember those?) on an afternoon walk sometime during the two years I lived in Krum. I discovered this album on that walk.  Tehillim’s pulsing, overlapping complexities ended up being an intellectually and kinetically invigorating soundtrack to an unexpectedly contemplative experience.


This performance starts at 1:39, and it has really nice lighting accompaniment.  When I stumbled across this clip, I was struck by how much larger the ensemble is than I had envisioned, and consequently, how much more complex the piece actually is.   

Although Tehillim has never gotten major rotation in my car, it has certainly remained in my listening orbit.  I regularly revisit it in quieter indoor settings.  Only recently, however, has another listening experience been able to dislodge the meditative walk I took over ten years ago from my memory. When my wife and I first began dealing with the unusual hours that a newborn infant foisted upon us, I set up a dedicated MP3 player in the room by our rocking chair and filled it with different kinds of soothing, intellectually stimulating music. It’s got Eastern Indian ragas, shakuhachi performances, jazz, Indonesian Gamelan, cross-cultual world music, ambient electronica, Stick music, and all manner of other styles floating under its “random album” button. There are also several minimalist composers represented, and obviously, Steve Reich is one of them.

Tehillim gained a new life for me in this venue. I can say with some confidence that a few months ago, the peice kept me from going totally bonkers when it was my turn for the dreaded 3-4 AM feeding. Thankfully, the Little One sleeps well through the night these days, but she still needs a little winding down before bedtime.  The booming lullabies that come from my mouth, however, just don't work like my wife's do. Tehillim, alternatively, serves as a wonderfully peaceful bedtime listen. Although it is calming, it is certainly not intellectually vacuous, like perhaps an ambient album or white noise machine might be. It’s incredibly expressive and deceptively complex to perform, and I can’t help but think that getting those structures in her ear as she drifts into dreamland is doing that growing brain some good.

Conducting Sabotage with "Sabotage:" Remembering MCA

My main gig in the mid 90s was working as a lackey in Blockbuster Music’s flagship store in Lewisville. In a way, the store was the last step in the evolution of music consumerism before the internet made hardcopy obsolete. The store was constructed with a complicated array of directional speakers and taped video that pummeled the customer with images and sounds as they moved through its labyrinthine aisles. When in the country section, you would only hear George Strait and Garth Brooks, but as the customer moved to the rock section, they would magically move into an environment bathed in the newest hits from Soundgarden and Smashmouth.

The screens assigned for each section played music videos of taped point-of-sale items. By today’s standards, they were pretty archaic. Relatively small screens were hooked up to VCRs that had to be rewound every three hours or so. For the casual customer, it worked pretty well. For the employee stuck in this environment for forty hours a week, however, it was incredibly overstimulating.  There was also a large nine-screen display that concentrated on the top sellers in each genre.  Its contents could be heard in the entryways and listening booth areas of the store.

Most of the music on this top-seller tape was utter crap. When the Beastie Boys' Ill Communication came out, however, Sabotage made the cut, and most of us in the store were delighted to have this track end up in rotation. We would always crank the song up when it came on. In fact, as an experiment, we slowly began testing the limits of the store's equipment on Sabotage, pushing it louder and louder each time it came up.



Eventually, the manager came up and complained about how it was so loud. We insisted, however, that the song was just louder on the tape than all of the others, and we began to take great joy in cranking the song up beyond all reason. Then, when the manager came and turned it down, we would turn the rest of the tape down to a barely audible level so that he would have to come back and turn it back up. This continued for nearly a month and a half until the next point of sale tape came in.

This is my most treasured memory of any Beastie Boys track, conducting sabotage with Sabotage, and the one that immediately came to mind when I heard about the untimely death of Adam Yauch, AKA MCA. I knew that he had been fighting cancer for awhile, and his absence in the videos attached to The Hot Sauce Committee made me concerned that the battle might not have been going so well.



Still, I was taken aback yesterday when I heard the news. Although I have many memories associated with the Beastie Boys music, I hope that this story is one that might have made Yauch smile in the way that his music often made me smile.