The minimalist composers in general, and Steve Reich in particular, were all quite enamoured of Williams's poetry. Steve Reich set pieces out of Pictures from Brueghel to a choir and orchestra. He chose extracts that directly mention music:
"take your song / which drives all things out of mind, / with you to the other world"
"Well, shall we / think or listen? Is there a sound addressed / not wholly to the ear? / We half close / our eyes. We do not / hear it through our eyes. / It is not / a flute note either, it is the relation / of a flute note / to a drum"
"It is a principle of music / to repeat the theme. Repeat / and repeat again, / as the pace mounts. The / theme is difficult / but no more difficult / than the facts to be / resolved"
And finally, less obviously related:
"Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant / to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize / them, he must either change or perish"
The extracts all reveal WCW's interest in uniting the arts. He often takes as his subject artistic criticism, or rather what it is to experience a work of art. He most often talks about paintings, of course, being himself an amateur painter; but occassionaly talks about the experience of music, or of the sensations of mundane life.
The last quote is the most interesting. Although a man of deep-felt social conscience, he was critical of the notion that poetry should be used as a tool of political rhetoric. He once said, though, that poetry awakened man from non-awareness, by drawing his attention to the intensity of living experience, which becomes at once a thing utterly squalid and wholly divine. When he says that man knows now "how to realize his wishes" he is speaking not only about the changes that technology, economy and democracy had brought to modern life (although it includes these things) but specifically the ability to become aware of oneself as a truly living, feeling being. This sense of possibility opens man up to becoming divine, or of perishing, because mere animal survival is no longer an option. Once a man has hopes - then those hopes must either be fulfilled or dissapointed.
Reich himself was particularly interested in how he saw these lines as relating to nuclear testing (in the White Sands and Alamagordo deserts). "Realize his wishes" in this sheme refers to man's technological capacities. He has said in interviews that the desert is a place that makes men mad. He cites the biblical passage where Jacob wrestles an angel in the desert - and explains that for him the passage talks about the conflict between man's technological power and his spiritual powerlessness, and the madness (desert) that brings the two into conflict.
