CityLife

MIF: Steve Reich - co-stars Kraftwerk were a closed book to me

Steve Reich

AS befits a festival dedicated to new work, no one who files into Manchester Velodrome to witness Kraftwerk’s electronic wizardry knows quite what to expect.

We know that the 5,000-strong crowd at the Manchester International Festival opener on July 2, will be issued with 3D glasses to enjoy some kind of visual presentation, about which details are hush-hush.

We all wonder whether the unusual setting of a cycle track may play its part in Kraftwerk’s show.

After all, Kraftwerk’s founder member Ralf Hütter is a fanatical cyclist, pedalling thousands of kilometres a year, and Kraftwerk’s 2003 album Tour de France Soundtracks was made in homage to the great cycle race in its centenary year.
 

Forefront of electronic music

Beyond that, all we know is that Kraftwerk – the Düsseldorf-based band at the forefront of electronic music for almost 40 years – will open Manchester International Festival with the help of American composer Steve Reich, whose new work 2x5 will be played by New York ensemble Bang On A Can. 
 

Kraftwerk are notoriously reticent about interviews, Steve Reich less so. And he is honest enough to admit that Kraftwerk were a closed book to him until this gig came along.
 

“I’d never heard their music until about three weeks ago,” said the 72-year-old American who is hailed by the New York Times as being America’s greatest living composer.
 

“Of course I’d heard the name. I think they were even around when I was in Berlin in the 1970s.
 

Little embarrassed

“So I said to one of the Bang On A Can musicians ‘I’ll feel a little embarrassed to go over there and not have ever heard their music’ – and he lent me some of their recordings.”
 

What did he think?
 

“I got a kick out of it,” he says. “At the time they started it was unlike anything that had ever been done, I’m sure. They’re obviously pretty smart guys.”
 

He doesn’t seem to have much more to offer.

But when you’re a composer who has become an icon in his own lifetime to classical musicians, responsible for seminal works of post-modernism and minimalism, you don’t really need to go any further.
 

Greenwich Village

Kraftwerk obviously have an audience, a following – and a very big one. Does he have a particular audience he writes for as a composer, too?
 

“I don’t write for anybody,” he exclaims. “I write for myself. That’s the only way any composer can come up with anything people are going to like. I thank God people find it satisfying.”
 

He points to a recent concert of his in a Greenwich Village nightclub – “it was full of young people, older people, artists, rock types”. So he knows he’s reaching plenty.
 

But he insists he is not ‘commercial’ – he doesn’t write movie music, ‘which is like buying it by the yard’.
 

Rockers in the audience

“If I don’t like what I’ve written, I trash it. I’ve trashed a lot of music.”
 

He’ll concede, though, that his work has had an effect of bringing the ‘vernacular’ closer to the world of art music. “In my audience there will be rockers,” he says. “Not because I’m writing for them, but because that’s the way it works.”
 

And he points out that his work has changed over time. “ I’ve stopped writing for orchestra. I don’t need 18 first violins – just like Bach, the greatest composer there ever was, didn’t need them.”
 

Hence his role in the world premiere of 2x5, the 20-minute piece that opens the Manchester International Festival at the Velodrome, will be in the sound booth.

Pre-recorded tape

It was a piece he had in mind to write just before the festival commission came through.

It’s for five musicians (guitars, piano, drums) and pre-recorded tape of the same people – “so there will be twice that number of guitar lines: it could be done all live in other circumstances.
 

“There are three movements: fast, slow, fast. It’s my music, but using rock and roll instruments.

“Only the drums don’t play all the time: what propels the piece is really the piano played very precisely together with the electric bass.

“And the guitar is run through an octave transposer, simply playing very high, long-held chords. It will sound very like a synth!”
Maybe Kraftwerk will think he’s a pretty smart guy, too.
 

Kraftwerk and Steve Reich at Manchester Velodrome, Thursday, July 2. Returns only