Do we play music or does music play itself? In the series of essays that comprise Writings About Music, the minimalist choreographer Steve Riech draws on his musical experience to consider questions like this one. Reich presents that the future of music is one where community, rhythm, and inspiration from non-Western cultures should take center stage. Fifty years after the book was released, the ever-increasing digitization of the modern world has made some of Reich’s predictions come true and others seem impossible, emphasizing how relevant Reich’s perspective on music still is today. 

In several of his essays, most predominantly “Some Optimistic Predictions (1970) about the Future of Music,” Riech argues that electronic music will slowly be replaced by a growing appreciation of world music. While Riech extensively discusses how electronic music has benefitted his creative process, describing for example, how he helped construct a 12-channel machine to create music that varies very precisely in phase (18-21), he goes on to argue that eliminating this electronic middleman between the composer and performer creates more impactful work, citing projects like his Four Organs (27). Influenced by the natural development of his ensemble for efforts like Four Organs, Reich claims that electronic music “will gradually die” and be subsumed in the larger world of “people singing and playing instruments” (28). As a part of this transition, Reich suggests that learning to play world music will provide Western musicians with new structures to build their compositions. However, Reich clarifies that there is a distinction between imitation and inspiration, distinguishing his future as one where Western musicians learn from musicians in Africa, Indonesia, India, and beyond and develop “new structural models” instead of borrowing non-Western traditions for “new models of sound” (28). Reich contests that the musical future will be characterized by an end to electronic music and an explosion of world-informed composition.

Central to his vision is Reich’s fundamental belief that music is grounded in rhythm. Acknowledging that it is easier than pitch or timbre to discuss analytically (vii), Reich frames Writings About Music around his rhythmic explorations and argues that centering rhythm is essential to the future development of music. When describing his musical vision, Reich claims that music will metastasize into an art form structured primarily around “the pulse” (28). One way in which Reich discusses the centrality of rhythm is through comparison to dance. Refuting the 1960s trend of setting dance pieces around benign activities like walking, Reich decries that not all movement is dance and not all sound is music (41). Reich claims that the Western world needs to recall the roots of dance in “regular rhythmic movement, usually done to music” (41). By drawing connections between music and dance, Reich laments the decentering of rhythm in both these disciplines, claiming that the beat must be essential going forward.

Weaving through all these predictions is Reich’s fundamental belief that music should be a communal activity. With pieces like Music for 18 Musicians (released after this book was published), Reich is most interested in the ensemble. Throughout Writings about Music, Reich poses himself in opposition to improvisation, describing that “music as a gradual process” cannot be improvisatory as the focus is the performance, not the performer  (11). Reich interrogates the distinctions between common non-Western music modalities, emphasizing his interest in African and Balinese music as it focuses on the collective instead of the soloist (39). In his “Notes on the Ensemble,” Reich describes how his ensemble formed, reflecting that his team of “musicians are also my first and most important critics” (47) and seeing rehearsal as an opportunity to build “a kind of ensemble solidity” (48). From this frame of view, one key distinction between sound and music is that music emerges when a collective gathers to create it with intention. 

The internet age has simultaneously ushered in and made Reich’s vision for the future of music impossible. Over the past 20 years, computers have become essential to music production, distribution, and consumption. With the increasing reliance on drum machines, rhythm has become all the more important to music, as long as it is mediated by a computer. In 2019, musicologist Nate Sloan argued that phrases like the syncopated drum break in the Jonas Brothers song “Sucker” indicated that a re-emergence of funk music was on the horizon. Popular music YouTuber Rick Beato quickly responded that funkiness comes from the kinetic energy of a slightly varying tempo (00:06:55), something that songs like “Sucker,” which are carefully quantized to a 16th note grid (00:03:50), no longer feature. Computers have also enabled people not only to imitate but also to outright steal from non-Western artists. AI music generators, for instance, are trained on massive data sets of music gathered potentially without compensating the artists. By digitizing rhythm and removing artist autonomy, the music industry has not coalesced around the human-centered world-conscious path Reich envisioned. 

The internet, however, has removed significant barriers to engaging with music and musicians across the world. With the advent of websites like YouTube and tools like Zoom, listening to non-Western music and learning from non-Western musicians is possible in a way that would have been unthinkable when Riech published Writings About Music. While Reich might contest that abstracted modern dance is not dance, performances like David Byrne’s American Utopia demonstrate how spartan marching band inspired choreography can highlight a rhythmic base constructed live by six drummers. The internet’s role in isolating humans is clear, but its power to help us connect (at least superficially) is also apparent. 

Discussing time, technology, and tradition, Writings about Music is a powerful view into a potential musical future as envisioned by minimalist composer Steve Riech in the mid-1970s. While the music industry is not as accepting, free, or communal as Reich might have optimistically hoped, the questions Reich proposes in Writings about Music are just as interesting as they were half a century ago.