Wandering into Steve Reich's Cave
The Cave is a multi-media exploration of the stories of Abraham, Hagar, Sarah, Ishmael, and Isaac from the book of Genesis, with music by Steve Reich and video by Beryl Korot. I’ve seen another of their collaborations live, but for The Cave I just have the CD with the music. I’ve been feeling a need to revisit it in light of having spent the last few weeks teaching material on the Israel/Palestine conflict, as it moves through three acts, in which the stories from Genesis are interwoven with commentary from Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans. This week I fulfilled that need.
Here’s a flavor:
The Cave is from the early 1990s, at a point where Reich was going through a musical style shift. The excerpt above is in a musical style that he also used in his setting of Psalms in his Tehillim. He uses this style when the music depicts the biblical texts. This style alternates with another approach he developed in his composition Different Trains, in which he breaks up recordings of spoken language and uses them as melodic building blocks. Here’s an example:
I’d listened through The Cave once or twice before. In previous listenings, I could not get past noticing the alternation of these styles. I had liked the concept of interweaving a biblical text with commentary from different perspectives, but picking up on the flow and coherence of the music overall eluded me. So, I’d felt like The Cave was one of those disappointing pieces where my excitement about a musical concept wasn’t satisfied by the actual music - much like I was looking forward to hearing Carl Nielsen’s symphony on the four temperaments but then found that it’s my least favorite of his symphonies.1 But yesterday, when I listened to The Cave, I had a different sense of flow. Rather than feeling like I was plodding through a long and somewhat dull journey, the nearly two hours it takes for The Cave to unfold flew by, although things started to drag a bit at the end. It had been a while since I was able to enjoy a long piece of music in this way and it was nice to know I still had the capacity to give myself over to music in a way that profoundly shifts my sense of time.
But I didn’t have the total absorption that I generally want from a musical experience. As I followed the flow of the music, I sometimes found myself thinking about how I would set the Psalms if I’d followed my high school/college draw to composition - which pulled me to thoughts of the seventeenth-century Lutheran composer Heinrich Schütz and some similarities between his approach to combining voices and instruments to Reich’s - and how in my own musical thoughts I was drawing on both of them. I found myself noticing moments where Reich’s harmonies sounded like those of the electronic band Stereolab, which drew me into more inchoate associations. These moments of comparison to my own compositional aspirations, Schütz, and Stereolab would sometimes get me thinking along another track, and I’d have to refocus on the unfolding of the music.
If my musical experience was one of something “clicking” that let me hear music that I’d previously heard as disjointed now being coherent, that coherence interacted with a couple of other different registers.
First, in light of the current - conflict? campaign? military operation? ethnic cleansing? - in Gaza, Reich’s musical exploration of co-existence pointed toward a kind of possibility and hope that ultimately goes unrealized. Reich simply presents a tapestry in which Israeli, Palestinian, and American perspectives co-exist, none privileged, none silenced. This presentation of co-existence neither makes an overt political claim nor completely evades the political dimensions of the situation. It provides an angle from which one can imagine a kind of peace, but it shapes that imagination in ways that aren’t sentimental or utopian. But the conversations I’ve had with students in the last weeks shows that the simple act of neither silencing nor privileging voices in this conflict is deeply utopian.
I’ve experienced the utopian nature of trying to neither silence nor privilege voices in particular in one of my ethics classes, where we’ve been reading Rosemary and Hermann Ruether’s The Wrath of Jonah, a work of theological ethics on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Ultimately, their verdict on Zionism is very negative - the hammer drops hard in the final chapter. I’ve had to work hard to show how Rosemary Ruether’s theological use of the biblical prophets leads to two concepts that are always in tension: (a) God takes sides with the oppressed and (b) the centrality of repentance, self-criticism, and a refusal to line up good and evil along community (religious or national) divides means that no side has a monopoly on goodness and truth. I had always seen this tension as productive and it gives Rosemary’s theology its richness. But reading The Wrath of Jonah through the lens of Mark Beauchamp’s Why the Israel-Palestine Conflict is So Polarized makes clear that in this work, the importance of realizing that no one side has a monopoly on good or evil fades in relation to the notion that God takes sides with the oppressed. The nuances are still there - the Ruethers highlight Jewish voices like Asher Ginsberg/Ahad Ha’am, who warned in the 1920s that Zionists were not respectful of the Arabs who lived in Palestine; they devote several pages to failures of Palestinian leadership - but as I’ve reviewed the book with my students, holding the creative tension of mutual dialogue and denunciation of oppression has been a task that feels like it inevitably betrays someone.
I can hear Reich’s music and Ruether’s theology as complementary - in a kind of private synthesis in my mind. Reich brings out the preconditions of deep listening - both as a musical practice and as just paying attention to what someone is saying - for any kind of peace. Ruether provides an analytical framework that doesn’t let go of the fact that neutrality in the face of oppression is already taking a side. I can see how these perspectives need each other. But I can also see, every time I turn on the news, that in practice, the center does not hold.