The portrait of Steve Reich that emerges from Rethinking Reich is filled with intentional points of convergence and tension, confirmations and contradictions, and balanced treatments of the so-called minimalist composer that provide the expertly curated volume with its hermeneutical richness and musicological value. The fourteen authors included—some whose professional and personal relationships to Reich have been career defining—demonstrate their willingness to raise timely (and sometimes uncomfortable) questions about the broader cultural and musical contexts for some of his most beloved works. They describe Reich in equal measures as a radical and a traditionalist, identifying his approach to composition as conservative and progressive, and his relationship to non-western culture as both respectful and exploitative. As the editors note in their introduction, these internal debates were a core aim of the volume: to resist the temptation to reduce Reich or his works to “single, simple meanings,” or to analyze them “in uniform and wholly consistent ways” (7). Such critical treatment required the authors to contend with Reich's own self-curated discourse, which Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn openly admit can “obfuscate more complex realities and contentious ideologies that lie under the surface of his music” (8). The result is a volume designed to “surprise” those who thought they knew Reich and to “help us reimagine what we thought we knew well, to shake our foundations and leave us with new ways of forming them” (10). Rethinking Reich does not minimize the composer's shortcomings nor genuflect before his accomplishments, and the result is an honest and powerful appraisal of one of the most influential musical minds in US concert music.

The volume is organized into four sections, but it becomes abundantly clear by the conclusion that any number of configurations might have been possible due to the myriad intersections between the essays. The first section, “Political, Aesthetic, and Analytical Concerns,” could well be considered an exposition on the intentional, if not provocative, design of the volume as a whole. The first two essays focus on two important compositional moments in Reich's career—the 1973 Carnegie Hall performance of Four Organs and Octet (1979)—and situate them within separate spheres of Western influence: the psychedelic counterculture of the United States (Gopinath) and European canonical traditions (ap Siôn). A similar juxtaposition follows in two essays dedicated to The Cave—a multimedia work that finally receives overdue critical attention—that uncover new perspectives based on archival materials from Reich's significant Nachlass, housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland. Here, Ryan Ebright's reading of The Cave as a political act is notable for its elegant writing, deft historiographical work, and accessibility to readers of varying interests.

The Cave serves as a sturdy bridge to the second section—“Repetition, Speech, and Identity”—which features three contributions concerned with Reich's so-called “documentary style.” Robert Fink purposefully casts the composer in the role of a “musical prophet” in order to advance a Derridean reading of The Cave as concerned with “making composition a vehicle for logocentric theology” and Reich a promulgator of “acoustical fundamentalism” (132). All of this gives Fink pause—“What happened to Steve Reich?” he queries at the onset—and the essay ultimately urges its readers to approach the composer's music and texts with healthy skepticism. As with the volume's other contributions, Fink's insights here are revelatory, but they rely upon a highly specialized discourse that would not be accessible to most lay and undergraduate readers. In general, the audience for the volume skews towards specialists and graduate students, which is not meant as a criticism. Indeed, one of the great values of the book is its appreciation for the wide methodological range of musicological inquiry. Positivistic sketch studies sit next to more hermeneutical imaginings, and the result is a holistic understanding of Reich as a composer and a cultural and metaphorical figure.

The third section, “Reich Revisited: Sketch Studies,” boasts a wide range of methodological tools, compositional inquiries, and conversations about the technological limits of knowledge in the digital age. Matthias Kassel, head archivist for Reich's materials at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, helpfully introduces the difficulties faced by researchers (and the Stiftung itself) as they attempt to access, or even preserve, electronic sketches designed for aging or obsolete hardware. The interfaces between technology, process, culture, and creative limits is a running theme throughout the volume, and Twila Bakker's essay on “Counterpoints and Computers” represents an excellent example of how scholars might contend with “the impact of music notation software on the working methods of composers” (247). As she notes, works like the Counterpoint series were forged in a technological period when new software for compositional experimentation were emergent, and yet very quirky. During this period, Reich's contrapuntal textures were just as likely to be influenced by traditional harmonic studies of J. S. Bach as they were by the interface of his son's Apple IIc and the Variations menu provided by Mark of the Unicorn's Professional Composer program. As Bakker argues, the Counterpoints reveal Reich's preference for creating “a new beginning from old ideas,” all the while “indexing wider socioeconomic shifts” associated with the final two decades of the twentieth century (252).

The final section, “Beyond the West: Africa and Asia,” explores the varied influences of non-Western practices—including African drumming, Balinese gamelan, and Hindi-yogic meditative breathing—on Reich's musical ideas. Notably, Martin Scherzinger provides a crucial essay that should be standard reading for any musicologist seeking to engage in post-canonical debates about the repertoire. Scherzinger proposes a historical account of Reich's understanding of African drumming practices that aims neither to “diminish [the] value of Western music nor [predict] its retrospective demise,” but rather to “responsibly enlarge and supplement existing histories of Western music, and thereby genuinely globalize our understanding of cultural production” (267). His expert facility in a wide range of tools—from the orienting role of the Gankogui in West African drumming ensembles to the intricate handclapping patterns (makwa) of mbira music—is breathtaking, allowing him not only to conclude with certainty that the “creative paraphrase of African music” in Electric Counterpoint and other works “throw the question concerning property . . . no less than its relation to political economy on a global scale into sharp relief,” but also to question “what are the ideological stages of obstructing a classical compositionem africanum from sounding ‘too African?’”—as Reich himself asked in one of his sketchbooks (298–99). This chapter is a powerful offering and will no doubt find itself quickly among the models for postcolonial musicology.

With such a wide range of essays to manage, the editors no doubt had several conversations about how best to organize them into thematic units. In truth, one of the pleasures of the volume are the many narrative threads, or “resultant patterns,” that emerge between discrete entries. For example, two essays found in parts 2 and 3, respectively, that critically contend with Reich's appropriation of black culture, each raise significant questions about Reich's treatment and presentation of racialized subjects. John Pymm's unearthing of the original sound collage that Reich composed for the Harlem Six benefit—a dramatization of Truman Nelson's book The Torture of Mothers derived from twenty-nine speech fragments featuring the voices of the six grieving mothers—is significant not only as a “prehistory” of Come Out, but also as a measure of the consequences of Reich's manipulation of the book. As Pymm contends, Reich's editing “magnifies the racial distinction between himself and the voices he presents . . . and in so doing presents a patriarchal chronicle” of these women's lives (153). Similarly, David Chapman argues convincingly that black idioms—such as two improvisational keyboard variations based on Reich's soundtrack for the controversial film Oh Dem Watermelons (1965)—inspired what would ultimately become the basis for Piano Phase, despite Reich's adamant statements to the contrary. In considering Scherzinger and Pymm's essays, one cannot help but wonder if Reich's resistance might not signal a darker truth—perhaps validating George Lewis's earlier argument that the white avant-garde “refused to admit African American experimental music as a legitimate part of the postwar musical avant-garde” (218). Such is the value of this volume: at its best, it extends beyond its own pages and engages critically with the current state of our discipline.