Artist on artist: Jasmin Kent Rodgman on the ‘genius’ of Steve Reich

Jasmin Kent Rodgman is a composer whose work brings together the worlds of contemporary classical music, electronics and sound art to create powerful soundscapes and musical identities.

While her compositions explore otherness, activism, memory, connection and play with a sense of narrative, Kent Rodgman is equally driven by how music is experienced and how the environment in which it is performed can impact the listening process and audience response. In 2024 she formally joined an organisation who share that drive to reshape how audiences experience classical music, becoming co-artistic director of Manchester Collective.

Much like Manchester Collective, Kent Rodgman is no stranger to the Southbank Centre. Her 2023 work what the dog said to the harvest, which drew on opera, dance, spoken word, immersive sound and film, receiving its premiere here as part of our Planet Summer. That same year also saw Kent Rodgman’s four-person simulation receive its London premiere here at the Southbank Centre as part of a Manchester Collective concert, which culminated in Steve Reich’s Different Trains.

A guiding figure in the world of contemporary classical music, Reich was a pioneer of the minimalism movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. Embracing new technology he innovated the use of tape to create loops, phasing patterns and audio process, evident on his early works such as Drumming, Clapping Music and Music for 18 Musicians. 

Reich has remained at the forefront of contemporary music ever since, experimenting with recorded voice and sampling on works such as 1988’s emotive Different Trains, which earned him a Grammy Award, and 1995’s City Life. In 2011 he premiered WTC 9/11, a response to the 11 September terror attack on New York. Reich has continued to compose and create into his eighties, and later this month we celebrate Reich’s 90th birthday here at the Southbank Centre with a series of concerts.

Ahead of these performances, Kent Rodgman kindly shared her love for her fellow composer, a man whose work she ‘stumbled upon’ as a teen, but then couldn’t stop coming back to. 

I was fairly late to properly lock in to Steve Reich’s music. I would have been in my late teens. I have a love of film music and at that age that was taking me on a bit of a whirlwind, where I was suddenly diving for musicians and composers who worked with visuals and with video. So, I found Reich that way, through the way he uses samples and video and those moments when he veers into a kind of music theatre, rather than through being an uber fan fan of minimalism when I was young. 

I kind of stumbled upon Reich’s music, rather than being guided to it. On weekends I’d go to HMV with my family, and if I’d heard an artist or even just seen them referenced in a documentary, I’d look up that artist and just mine the shelves. It’s how I first stumbled across European arthouse cinema in my mid-teens, and it’s also how I came to Reich’s The Cave. I actually miss that mode of discovery. Now, with the internet at your fingertips, you can feel guilty if you don’t know a composer’s entire back catalogue, but there is a sense of adventure in not knowing. And that’s definitely closer to how I came across Reich, through randomly mining for him, rather than being an instant aficionado. 

He has this unique ability to hold a space in time. To steal a quote that a lovely colleague at Manchester Collective found about Steve Reich, it’s as if he opens the window to New York, and you just hear those sounds of his life float into his pieces. His music becomes this direct commentary on the world, which is incredibly powerful, and really makes him stand out, even from the other great composers and minimalists of his time.

There’s something so distinctly American, and distinctly New York about the where and when of his music. It immediately transports you there. When you listen to ‘City Life’, in one way it is doing exactly what it says on the tin, but at the same time it’s so distinct that I immediately get a rich strong reaction to it; it conjures up my own visual references, and a real sense of memoir. Not like a time machine as such, but it certainly places me in a capsule or a bubble of that moment. There are other New York minimalists of course, and I love their music for various reasons, but with Reich you get this powerful sense of time and place; it’s like a documentary, a sonic archive.

I really love the way he uses tape. The counterpoint it brings and how it creates a battle, as a performer of his music you’re pitted against yourself; you’re your own prerecorded instrument. Not many other people have really done that. He has set a precedent in his language, and that’s there even when he doesn’t use tape; in his classic phasing, in his tessellation of melodies, the threads he pulls at. But that way he uses tape and sampling, that’s something I keep coming back to. I don’t do it in my own composition, but there’s a strong desire to. 

At the moment I’m obsessed with ‘City Life’. Because it’s New York and it’s everything that New York could be, can be, will be, distilled into this incredible piece of work. I would love for Manchester Collective to play ‘City Life’ at some time in the future.

‘Different Trains’ is one of Reich’s works that I come back to a lot. When I first worked with Manchester Collective in 2023, before I became co-artistic director, it was on a new string quartet and electronics commission – ‘four-person simulation’ – and when it received its premiere the programme finale was a performance of ‘Different Trains’. That any new commission of mine would be programmed next to Steve Reich was such an incredible moment. And I’d loved ‘Different Trains’ before that, so it felt like a real moment of serendipity.

One reason why I keep returning to ‘Different Trains’ is that it’s so powerful, and yet it’s not a polemic. It’s not a lecture. It simply allows for people’s voices to shine through, and for me there’s a real genius in that way composition and music can really speak to something political. Arguably, the whole act of making music and art is political, whether you’re saying something political or not, but ‘Different Trains’ offers a real reflection and a human intimacy for a time that has really shaped our political and cultural narrative. And so, even though it perhaps wasn’t one of my favourites when I first picked it up – not in the way that, say, ‘Clapping Music’ immediately brought me joy – it now just feels really poignant.

I’m yet to see any of his large-scale works live. I’ve never seen ‘City Life’ live, I’ve not seen ‘Music for 18 Musicians’ live. But I have seen performances of his work that have really stayed with me, including Manchester Collective’s performance of ‘Different Trains’, and their ‘Double Sextet’, the tape version, where they played against themselves in neon. And I’ve also seen Sean Shibe do ‘Electric Counterpoint’, which was incredible, seeing the piece played by this virtuosic force of nature. 

I like the very human way in which Steve Reich talks about his own music. Composing is a solitary thing, and I’ve seen programme notes of his in which he describes it as being a lonely exercise. I think it’s good to admit when things are hard or when things aren’t easy, it gives people access and insight into who you are.

It’s not that there’s not a complexity in the way he writes about his music, but it’s very accessible. Whether you’re a composer or not there’s a resonance there, you can understand his process in the way he talks about music. I’m not very good at talking about my own work because I think it takes a real skill or innate talent to be able to distill quite complicated processes into very simple language. So I really admire that about Steve Reich.

A thing that excites me about Reich is that a lot of his music speaks of this time of experimentation. There was something of a snowball effect in the way that this creative community came together in the 1960s and collided with one another across music and dance and theatre and ballet in a way that you can hear. And it was a time when getting your work recorded and performed was somewhat easier because things weren’t as painfully expensive for artists or as oppressively difficult to access as they are now.

There is something of a parallel to that collaborative creative environment Reich grew out of happening now. One of the positives about the online world we live in is democratisation it brings, the porosity, particularly in terms of access to sounds. So there is something of a zeitgeist, a mini-school of now, in the work of composers like Ben Nobuto and Oliver Leith where you can really hear the ‘now’ in their music, and so even if you’re not Japanese you’ll recognise the glitch music and references in Nobuto’s work. In the same way there was that real unity and tightness coming out of the 1960s and 1970s, there’s something starting to crystallise in an aesthetic of now.

The first thing to come to mind when I hear the name Steve Reich is tape. And then, if you play the word association game, it’s tape, memoir, memory, cycles. That process that comes from tape and recording, that tapestry of weaving these together, but also still allowing for an element of flexibility. I love Cello Counterpoint, and you can play that as a soloist with the tape part, or you could play it as a cello octet if you fancied – or if you somehow found the money to put on that show. But the first thing I think of with him is tape. Tape and then memory.