Steve Reich turns 90 this week, and the essay opens where his imagination did: with two tape pieces from the mid-1960s that changed what Western art music could care about. It's Gonna Rain takes the voice of Brother Walter, a Pentecostal street preacher in San Francisco whose 1965 apocalypse sermon Reich looped against itself until it became something beyond speech — a sonic wall, a sublime inundation matching the one being announced. Come Out, made the following year, uses the voice of Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six, six Black men wrongly convicted of first-degree murder in New York. The piece was commissioned as background music for a benefit event to cover their legal costs. These are not abstract compositional gestures. They are people — which is exactly Reich's point. The essay's argument is that technique divorced from human stakes is a dead end. Reich's looping, canoning, and phasing procedures aren't cold formalism; they're embedded in who is speaking and why. The micro-canon emerged accidentally when one tape machine slipped out of sync with another, but the reason it matters is that it was Brother Walter's voice doing the slipping — a man warning of floods, becoming flood. Hannah Kendall, born sixty years after Reich, is working the same territory from a different angle. She draws on Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo's concept of the 'plantation machine' — the industrial logic and global networks of dehumanising capital that powered the slave trade, which she hears echoing still in today's systems of environmental destruction and technological control. Her response is to creolise the orchestra: dreadlock cuffs on string instruments to mute and distort their patrician sound; walkie-talkies, music boxes, harmonicas, and kettles as instruments. The kettles aren't whimsy — they reference a history of enslaved people singing and praying into them to stay below earshot of plantation owners. When you hear Shouting Forever Into the Receiver or the recent Building a Burning House, you are hearing an orchestra forced to account for its own origins. The essay's third movement lands hard. Sergiu Celibidache, the Romanian conductor of the Munich Philharmonic, is getting a biopic — The Yellow Tie, apparently the most-watched Romanian film of 2025. But alongside the biopic, the essay points viewers to Abbie Conant: A Solo Among Men, a documentary telling a story the biopic doesn't. Conant won a blind audition for principal trombone of the Munich Philharmonic in 1980 at age 25. Celibidache told her: 'We need a man for the solo trombone.' She was demoted to second trombone, paid less than male colleagues, openly bullied by the conductor, and subjected to humiliating medical and physical tests when she initiated discrimination proceedings against the City of Munich. It took over twelve years for her to win her case. She left of her own accord in 1993. Celibidache's reputation rests substantially on his Bruckner recordings with the Munich Philharmonic — performances of excessively slow, sonically beautiful but expressively one-dimensional monumentalism, calcifying Bruckner's contradictions into a single stone gesture. The essay is direct: his Bach B Minor Mass performance is a masochistic trial of patience. What's more important is the structural point: the transcendence Celibidache pursued required treating a human being as an inconvenient obstacle. 'Purity,' the essay concludes, 'as always, is no such thing.' Reich and Kendall compose with empathy and historical consciousness. Celibidache followed an ideology willing to erase the human to achieve the sublime. The contrast is the argument, and it lands.
