Musical symbols of the ephemera – eternal dichotomy in the final movement of “Tehillim”by Steve Reich

Abstract

In my paper, I chose to analyze a 20th-century work by Steve Reich, a musical setting of psalms in the Hebrew language. The dichotomy between the evanescence and the eternal in the last musical part of Tehillim is a hermeneutical aspect that caught my attention because of the artful way in which the composer used augmentation as a symbol of time dilation. Time and rhythm in music are metaphorical images of extra-musical time –human time in comparison with divine time. The hermeneutic analysis of the musical texts offers the opportunity to go beyond the harmonic and rhythmic texture, to a spiritual universe whereby the composer argues his choices.